When scientists study the effects of climate change on Greenland’s ice, they often focus on the ice sheet, the massive, permanent mass of ice that covers about 80 percent of the island. But there are thousands of peripheral glaciers along the Greenland coast that have separated from the ice sheet, and these have so far been little explored.

Using a combination of historic aerial photographs and satellite images of Greenland, scientists analyzed the movement of more than 1,000 surrounding glaciers from 1890 to 2022. And unfortunately the results are dismal. According to researchers, the rate of retreat of surrounding glaciers has doubled in the last 20 years.

“Peripheral glaciers account for only 4 percent of Greenland’s total ice-covered area, but they account for 14 percent of the island’s current ice loss—a disproportionately large share,” said first author Laura LaRocca, a climate scientist and geospatial scientist. Of work. The message provides information about the results. “If you look at all glaciers globally, except for the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, they are responsible for about 21 percent of the observed sea level rise in the last two decades.”

Historic aerial photographs of Greenland were critical to the team’s analysis. Earth-observing satellites were not launched until the 1970s, so scientists long believed that a detailed record of observations of the glaciers around Greenland did not exist until then. But 15 years ago, an archive of old photographs, including images of the country’s coastline, was discovered in a castle in Greenland. These images were taken by the pilots of the open-cockpit aircraft.

“These ancient photographs expand the data set from before the satellite era, when widespread observations of the cryosphere were rare,” William Dearing Yarrow Axford Professor of Geological Sciences at Northwestern University said in a statement. “It is amazing that we can now provide long-term records for hundreds of glaciers, finally allowing us to document the response of Greenland glaciers to climate change over more than a century.” Source