Earth’s Internal Heat Melting Greenland’s Ice Sheets
msn.com
.................... Researchers from the Arctic Research Centre (ARC) in Aarhus University, Denmark, and the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources studied fjord called Young Sound, which also has many hot springs, for over 10 years. And they found that the heat coming from under the fjords is causing glaciers on the ice sheet to slide toward the sea.
Several glaciers flow into the area of Young Sound where researchers have shown that heat from the Earth's interior warms up the bottom water of the fjord.Photo: Mikael Sejr
“Northeast Greenland has several hot springs where the water becomes up to 60 degrees [Celsius] warm and, like Iceland, the area has abundant underground geothermal activity. … There is no doubt that the heat from the Earth’s interior affects the movement of the ice, and we expect that a similar heat seepage takes place below a major part of the ice cap in the northeastern corner of Greenland,” Soren Rysgaard of ARC, who headed the investigations, said in a statement Monday.
Estimating the amount of heat emanating from Earth’s interior — called geothermal heat flux — is tricky to do when it comes to localizing it below glaciers. The researchers chose the exact spot to study because the regions have several glaciers connected to the same ice sheet, and focused on an area which is an isolated basin within Young Sound. The depth of the basin ranges between 200 and 300 meters, and the researchers measured the heating of deep water over 10 years.
Based on the data they collected, the scientists estimated the heat absorbed by the fjord was about 100 megawatt per square meter, which “corresponds to a 2-megawatt wind turbine sending electricity to a large heater at the bottom of the fjord all year round.”Although it may be biting cold over the water, heat from the Earth's interior is transported to the bottom water of Young Sound, northeast Greenland.
Although it may be biting cold over the water, heat from the Earth's interior is transported to the bottom water of Young Sound, northeast Greenland.
Heat from the fjord also heats up the bottom of the glacier, melting the underside, which allows them to slide more easily over the rough terrain on their otherwise slow and sluggish journey to the sea.'
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