University of Colorado at Boulder Professor Konrad Steffen, who has conducted climate research in Greenland annually since 1990, says dynamic processes on the massive Greenland ice sheet as a result of warming temperatures may affect estimates for global sea rise during the 21st century and beyond.
A podcast featuring Steffen's research on Greenland -- which indicates some glaciers have increased their velocities and ice discharge by up to two-fold in the past decade -- can be accessed on the Web at . Steffen, who is director of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, reported at the American Geophysical Union meeting last month in San Francisco that the extent of the 2007 ice sheet melt broke the 2005 summer melt record by 10 percent.
Steffen maintains an extensive climate-monitoring network of 22 stations on the Greenland ice sheet, transmitting hourly data via satellites to study ice-sheet processes. He and his team have been using a rotating laser and sophisticated camera system provided by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to map the volume and geometry of cylindrical shafts in the ice known as moulins that drain melt water from the Greenland ice sheet to the ice-sheet bed, speeding up glaciers.
CIRES is a joint institute of CU-Boulder and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. For more information on Steffen's research, visit the Web at: /. For more information, contact Steffen at (303) 492-4524 or Jim Scott in the CU-Boulder news office at (303) 492-3114.