More on the death of the glaciers

 

This is a rather sad post.  The two images above are from East Greenland, not far from Scoresbysund.   

The top photo is from the newest 2022 Bing satellite imagery.  I thought first of all that I was looking at a grainy or low-res image, but no -- the speckling effect which we might refer to as "glacier pox" is all down to the presence of thousands of blue meltwater pools on the glacier surface.  These glaciers, within the past few years, have started melting catastrophically, not just down in the snout area but right up into the accumulation zone or ice catchment areas.  Most of the water finds its way down to the bed via moulins and crevasses, but much of it is just temporarily trapped on the surface, reducing albedo and further increasing melting through a positive feedback mechanism.  Seriously scary.......

The lower image shows what this intensely glaciated landscape looked like at the height of the melting season, up until a few years ago.  Nice clean white glacier ice on the glaciers, heavily crevasses but not overwhelmed by surface meltwater.  But then came the tipping point.......

To make matters even worse, it now rains -- instead of snows -- in the summer right up at the heads of these glaciers and on the ice sheet.

This is completely unprecedented, and all we can do is watch in horror while the politicians (like our new PM) pretend that the CO2 reduction targets are somehow disposable items which can be dumped if it is expedient to so so..........  are they mad, or just stupid?