Earth’s inner heat helps control Greenland’s ice

Far from the ocean, the Earth's crust influences the state of Greenland's ice.

Christine Zenino

It’s assumed knowledge that ice melting in the polar regions is governed by seasons. In summer, the Northern hemisphere’s polar ice cap loses tonnes of its ice due to the warmth of the sun and ocean currents. Increasingly, human activity is making this melting worse as the Arctic warms in response to an increase in carbon dioxide.

But now, in a new report in Nature Geoscience, climate scientists have found that the Earth’s interior heat can also melt some ice, at least in those regions that are completely blanketed. Previously, this heat flow was thought to be insignificant in comparison to other factors.

Irina Rogozhina of the Helmholtz Institute in Potsdam and her colleagues looked at Greenland’s ice sheets. Because a large amount of water is held in these permanent ice sheets, climate scientists have been monitoring them carefully. One of the important measures of their dynamics is the amount of water that melts from the base of these glaciers.