A large-scale study led by Dominik Fahrner, Liverpool University, that involved the Austrian Polar Research Institute (APRI) provides evidence of a severe Greenland-wide retreat of glacier fronts on the world’s largest island that began in the 1980s. Jakob Abermann of APRI collaborated on the analysis of satellite data from 206 calving glaciers in Greenland during the period 1984 – 2017. “In the northeast of the island, this decline has been observed since 1984. From 2004 onwards it has intensified. This is evidence that glaciers are responding massively to climate change”, says Jakob Abermann.

The analysis showed that the calving glaciers, when considered as a group, respond linearly to climate changes. In contrast, the behavior of individual glaciers is very complex and non-linear. Furthermore, it was shown that, despite a Greenland-wide retreat of tidewater glaciers, ice discharge is relatively balanced and mainly determined by 11 of the 206 glaciers analyzed. Jakobshavn Glacier, Helheim Glacier, and Kangerlussuaq Glacier show the largest changes in the ice flow. Glaciers in the southwest, northwest, and southeast of the Greenland Ice Sheet appear to have remained relatively stable until the 1990s. Then however, there was a steady retreat of 190 of the 206 tidewater glaciers analyzed across Greenland. The retreat of the glacier fronts is accompanied by rising sea surface temperatures at the sea surfaces and an increase in air temperatures. In contrast, in northeastern Greenland a persistent linear retreat is observed over the entire period studied as early as 1984. It is noteworthy that the steady retreat of glacier fronts in the period 2002-2003 was preceded by three years of increasing water temperature at sea surfaces and deviations from the long-term mean summer air temperature.