Scientists head to Greenland to study ice melt’s impact on vital ocean currents
Scientists aim to improve predictions on climate change impacts
A group of international scientists are heading to Greenland on the UK’s polar research ship RRS Sir David Attenborough to study how quickly melting ice sheets are pushing vital ocean currents towards collapse.
The team is set to depart from Harwich International Port in Essex on Thursday for the six-week expedition to south-east Greenland, where the researchers will study tidewater glaciers near Kangerlussuaq Fjord.
They plan to use a range of cutting-edge equipment – including a fleet of airborne drones, marine robots, satellites and sensors – to collect data on the fjord glaciers and the surrounding ocean.
Advances in technology mean they will be able to examine the ice sheet in ways they would not have thought possible even a few years ago, they said.
It is hoped that the data gathered can be used to improve predictions for the future of Greenland’s glaciers and their impact on the surrounding ocean as they melt.
It comes as Greenland’s rapidly melting ice adds vast quantities of freshwater into the ocean, with scientists warning that this could change a major Atlantic Ocean current system, called the North Atlantic Subpolar Gyre.
This in turn affects the so-called Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) – a network of deep and surface currents that stabilise the global climate and help to keep temperatures milder in Western Europe compared to other regions at similar latitudes, such as parts of eastern Canada as well as Siberia.
A breakdown of this system could potentially plunge the UK and large parts of the Northern Hemisphere into a new ice age – an outcome that was dramatised in the 2004 Hollywood blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow.
Some estimates have recently suggested the change could happen within decades, and would lead to huge impacts on UK agriculture as well as large parts of the country being frozen over for months each year.
The scientists said collecting a pioneering array of data is vital because current climate models do not accurately represent the complex ways in which Greenland’s glaciers interact with the warming ocean.
The team will study fjord and glacier behaviour on different scales, looking at individual cracks in the ice to the flow of meltwater and icebergs into the North Atlantic.
Scientists will use the ship as a floating laboratory to conduct detailed measurements of fjord depth and shape, as well as ocean temperature, salinity and currents.
The RRS Sir David Attenborough will also become a launch platform for a range of autonomous vehicles that will sample in the hazardous region near the ice.
The fieldwork comes as part of a major five-year project called “Greenland Ice sheet to Atlantic Tipping points” – or Giant, which is a collaboration of 17 international partners led by British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and funded by the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA).
Dr Kelly Hogan, a marine geophysicist at BAS who is leading the Giant research project, said: “We’re in a moment where our tools have finally caught up with our questions.
“With autonomous vehicles, advanced sensors and powerful modelling – boosted by AI – we can explore glacier-ocean interactions in ways that were unimaginable just a few years ago.”
Among the many advanced tools being deployed as part of this mission is Meltstake – a first-of-its-kind instrument that is lowered into the water by a remotely operated boat and drills into the ice 100 metres below the surface to measure how water transfers heat to the ice.
A surface skimming robot called “DriX” will map the shape of the glacier under the water with a scanning sonar, tracking changes in melt rate on daily or even hourly timescales and gathering information about ocean properties close to the glacier.
The UK’s most famous underwater robot – Boaty McBoatface – will also be part of the fleet, diving 1,500 metres deep below the churning mixture of icebergs and sea ice in the fjords, known as a melange.
It will map the melange’s geometry and study how it impacts the surrounding ice and ocean as it melts.
Pierre Dutrieux, an oceanographer at BAS who is leading the ocean robotics research, said: “If we want to understand how glaciers melt and fracture, we need to be where the action happens – where the glacial ice meets the ocean.
“We need these ocean robots to do this – the glacier front is so unpredictable and dangerous, because huge blocks of ice calve into the ocean with little warning.
“With the fleet of autonomous and remotely controlled instruments we have with us, some of the data we’ll be collecting will be the first of its kind.”
A small team of researchers will also be camping near the glacier itself to collect more data about how the ice is behaving, employing instruments that measure how fast the glacier is moving and record ice cracking or breaking off into the sea.
Boosted by machine learning and artificial intelligence, the data collected will feed directly into a hierarchy of ice, ocean and climate models, including the next-generation UK Earth System Model, which will be better equipped to predict how Greenland ice loss impacts global climate change – because of the Giant project.
The researchers also plan to develop a prototype early warning system to provide advance notice of rapid glacier change.