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· Estimates of sea-level rise out of date, say scientists
· Religious leaders pray for planet at Greenland glacier * Paul Brown in Ilulissat
* The Guardian
* Saturday September 8 2007 The Greenland ice cap is melting so quickly that it is triggering
earthquakes as pieces of ice several cubic kilometres in size break off.
Scientists monitoring events this summer say the acceleration could be
catastrophic in terms of sea-level rise and make predictions this
February by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change far too low. The glacier at Ilulissat, which supposedly spawned the iceberg that sank
the Titantic, is now flowing three times faster into the sea than it was
10 years ago. Robert Corell, chairman of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, said in
Ilulissat yesterday: "We have seen a massive acceleration of the speed
with which these glaciers are moving into the sea. The ice is moving at
2 metres an hour on a front 5km [3 miles] long and 1,500 metres deep.
That means that this one glacier puts enough fresh water into the sea in
one year to provide drinking water for a city the size of London for a
year." He is visiting Greenland as part of a symposium of religious,
scientific, and political leaders to look at the problems of the island,
which has an ice cap 3km thick containing enough water to raise
worldwide sea levels by seven metres. Yesterday Christian, Shia, Sunni, Hindu, Shinto, Buddhist and Jewish
religious leaders took a boat to the tongue of the glacier for a silent
prayer for the planet. They were invited by Bartholomew I, the spiritual
leader of 250 million Orthodox Christians worldwide. Dr Corell, director of the global change programme at the Heinz Centre
in Washington, said the estimates of sea level rise in the IPCC report
were based on data two years old. The predicted rise this century was
20-60cm (about 8-24ins) , but it would be at the upper end of this range
at a minimum, he said, and some believed it could be two metres. This
would be catastrophic for European coastlines. He had flown over the Ilulissat glacier and "seen gigantic holes in it
through which swirling masses of melt water were falling. I first looked
at this glacier in the 1960s and there were no holes. These so-called
moulins, 10 to 15 metres across, have opened up all over the place.
There are hundreds of them." This melt water was pouring through to the bottom of the glacier
creating a lake 500 metres deep which was causing the glacier "to float
on land. These melt-water rivers are lubricating the glacier, like
applying oil to a surface and causing it to slide into the sea. It is
causing a massive acceleration which could be catastrophic." The glacier is now moving at 15km a year into the sea although in surges
it moves even faster. He measured one surge at 5km in 90 minutes - an
extraordinary event. Veli Kallio, a Finnish scientist, said the quakes were triggered because
ice had broken away after being fused to the rock for hundreds of years.
The quakes were not vast - on a magnitude of 1 to 3 - but had never
happened before in north-west Greenland and showed potential for the
entire ice sheet to collapse. Dr Corell said: "These earthquakes are not dangerous in themselves but
the fact that they are happening shows that events are happening far
faster than we ever anticipated."
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