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COPENHAGEN: Greenland’s glaciers are releasing four times more icebergs than 25 years ago as a result of climate change, with implications extending to maritime traffic and marine ecosystems, researchers said on Thursday.
“Our results indicate a direct, climate-driven connection between glacier change at the surface, amplified iceberg traffic, and the increased availability of hard-bottom habitats on the deep seafloor,” according to the study by researchers from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), published in the scientific journal Nature.
“When the Greenland ice melts, sea levels rise. But we can also see that the changes affect the entire Arctic,” Shfaqat Abbas Khan, one of the study’s authors, said in a DTU press release. In the Fram Strait, between northeast Greenland and Svalbard, “the occurrence of icebergs has quadrupled since the year 2000”, the statement said.
In addition, the proportion of groups of icebergs originating from Greenland and from the Russian Arctic, and comprising more than five individual icebergs, has increased by 4.5per cent per decade since the turn of the century.
