About MeltFactor
This site contains my stream of consciousness on current ice and climate science…
My profession is the scientific enterprise to understand and predict the cryosphere and its climate sensitivity.
Glaciers were once used to refer to something slow. You know the old saying that X is ‘proceeding at a glacial pace’. The saying is today illogical, because the conventional though is changed. Glaciers respond very quickly, in some cases, as fast as it takes water to fall.
In response to warming, many of the planet’s largest glaciers have accelerated 50%, 100% 200% 300%, even 800%. Several of the largest Greenland glaciers have accelerated by a factor of 2 or more, in response to changes at their fronts ultimately linkable to enhanced melting during a warming period. Antarctic glaciers, once dammed by shelf ice, have decanted, accelerating several times their formerly buttressed speed because melt water cut through the ice like acid, opened the flood gates.
In the mid 1990s, conventional science held the reaction time of ice sheets to be tens of thousands of years, even longer. Further science led us to recognition, that melt is a key factor that allows ice masses (large and small) to react quickly (in hours) to abrupt climate warming.
Melt [water] is the core factor in a scale-independent sensitivity of ice to climate warming.
…this is the MeltFactor.
Your friend,