A helicopter view of Greenland's ice sheet illustrates the difficulty in grasping the landscape's scale. Observations reveal that crevasses, cracks formed by surface stresses, vary significantly, from millimeters to over 100 meters wide, as the ice accelerates towards the ocean. Recent research mapped these crevasses in 2016 and 2021, providing insights into their growing size due to warming ocean temperatures. The mapping utilized high-resolution satellite images to investigate the changing ice sheet, highlighting the importance of monitoring and understanding these phenomena in the context of climate change.
Observing Greenland from a helicopter highlights the difficulty of comprehending scale; what seems like frozen waves is often icebergs the size of office blocks.
Crevasses, formed by stresses in the ice, vary in size dramatically across Greenland, indicating how the ice sheet flows towards the ocean and revealing the effects of climate change.
As the ocean warms, the Greenland ice sheet speeds up, resulting in larger crevasses that pose a risk. Mapping these changes is crucial to understanding the scale of this growth.
Using high-resolution satellite images, our research from 2016 and 2021 assessed the extent of crevasse growth, revealing challenges in monitoring the rapidly changing Greenland ice sheet.
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