The current climate-change driven acceleration in tidewater glacier melt in Greenland is another example of why calling anything “impossible” in complex systems is usually a bad idea:
The abrupt acceleration of melting in Greenland has taken climate scientists by surprise. Tidewater glaciers, which discharge ice into the oceans as they break up in the process called calving, have doubled and tripled in speed all over Greenland. Ice shelves are breaking up, and summertime â€œglacial earthquakesâ€ have been detected within the ice sheet.
“The general thinking until very recently was that ice sheets donâ€™t react very quickly to climate,â€ said Martin Truffer, a glaciologist at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. â€œBut that thinking is changing right now, because weâ€™re seeing things that people have thought are impossible.”
[via NY Times]