Greenland’s Ice Sheet Surface Melt Is Accelerating While Antarctica’s Slows Down

EcoWatch - According to a new study by researchers at the Netherlands’ Utrecht University and the University of California, Irvine (UCI), the rate at which Greenland’s surface ice has been melting has increased in recent decades, while surface ice melt in Antarctica has slowed. For the study, the researchers examined the role that katabatic and Foehn winds — downslope gusts that bring dry, warm air rushing to the tops of glaciers — play in the melting of Greenland’s ice sheet. They said that, in the past decade, melting related to the winds has increased more than 10 percent in Greenland, but their impact on Antarctica’s ice sheet has gone down by 32 percent.