Word: icing
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...Greenland with a team of scientists, Danish officials (Greenland is a loosely governed Danish territory) and other journalists to visit a research project that may help answer one of the most important questions in climate science today: Will global warming melt the Greenland ice sheet? The massive ice sheet that covers all but the rocky coasts of Greenland is a relic of the last Ice Age. If it were to melt, it would release enough water to raise global sea levels by some 7 m - and that would spell the end for major coastal cities like New York City...
...best ways to try to figure out what will happen in the future is to ascertain what happened in the past. That's why we're in Greenland. Our team will be visiting the North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling (NEEM) project, an international research team that has staked out a corner of the island's ice sheet and will, as the name suggests, drill. The ice in central Greenland is nearly 3 km thick, and as you drill down to the bottom, you can read the climatic history of the island as if you were counting tree rings going back...
Such experiments have been done in Greenland and Antarctica for decades, with ice cores that can track climatic history up to 800,000 years ago, and they've helped form the bulk of our knowledge about past climate change. But the timeline is patchy, especially in Greenland, where we haven't been able to get a reliable ice core dating from 115,000 to 130,000 years ago. That's the Eemian period, and during those years the earth was some 5?C warmer than it is today. The NEEM scientists, whose ice cores should track back to that period...
...loses its meaning during an Arctic summer. As we drive down Kangerlussuaq's only road, we pass sprawling glacial-melt lakes of the purest blue, framed by rocky hills dusted with brush. The landscape seems freshly carved, as indeed it is in Greenland, where the expansion and contraction of ice constantly remakes the earth...
...river that pours down its side, as if bleeding. The Greenlanders in our group say it melts more and more each summer and recovers less and less. Actually, the speed of the glacier toward the sea has slowed in recent years - but that's not because there's more ice. Paradoxically, because so much ice has melted away in central Greenland, there is less pressure on the coastal glaciers to move. In Greenland, more than any other place, you can see global warming in action, and as I stand before the glacier, that's what I'm seeing. The landscape...