A close up of the giant chasm in the Greenland glacier.
NASA routinely finds some pretty interesting stuff. Black holes that eat stars for a decade and habitable oceans and whatnot. Their Earth Science Division, though, routinely finds pretty terrifying stuff–mostly because they’re shining a light on just how much our way of life is quickly ruining the planet. The most recent bit of proof? A giant crack in a Greenland ice shelf that’s confusing researchers.
From today’s #IceBridge flight: Portion of the newly identified rift on Petermann Glacier’s ice shelf (straight feature near bottom center) pic.twitter.com/kmeQoik8ZO
— NASA ICE (@NASA_ICE) April 14, 2017
NASA’s Earth Science program is facing some serious cuts under President Trump’s itchy thumb. Such deep cuts, in fact, that they prompted the world’s first protest from space. After Edgar Mitchell, an astronaut on Apollo 14, said “You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch,’” a group of space experts sent up a weather balloon with a message for the president.
Anyway, let’s get back to Greenland. NASA’s Earth Science Division, as you may well know, “is a coordinated series of satellite and airborne missions for long-term global observations of the land surface, biosphere, solid Earth, atmosphere, and oceans.” When they took a peek at Greenland’s Petermann Glacier, they noticed something that could potentially be a big, big problem: a giant crack running right through the middle of it.
Now, it’s not all that strange for ice shelves to form cracks and break off. In fact, the Larsen ice shelf in Antartica has basically been falling apart for years now (although it’s gotten way worse and is starting to seem a bit worrisome). Since ice shelves are already floating in the ocean, they aren’t a point of interest when it comes to sea level rise. What they are important for, though, is holding back the glacier behind them. As ice shelves break off, ice sheets move in behind them. If the ice shelves disappear entirely… well, let’s just say that Waterworld might be on the money.
The Petermann Glacier has been cracking up since about 2010, but the crack in the middle of it is particularly worrisome. After Stef Lhermitte first spotted it on satellite imagery, NASA’s cryosphere-monitoring Operation IceBridge initiative recently photographed it for the first time–and it is huge.
From today’s #IceBridge flight: A closeup shot of the new rift on Petermann Glacier’s ice shelf, NW Greenland. pic.twitter.com/mb0hYO8Zlm
— NASA ICE (@NASA_ICE) April 14, 2017
According to NASA, it’s occurring near another much larger crack. If the two cracks happen to intersect, more than half of the glacier would separate. Researchers are confused about how it happened, as most of the time, the ocean just slowly eats away at the underbelly of ice shelves along the edges. A crack right through the middle shouldn’t be occurring–but it is, and there’s not a lot we can do about it.
With any luck, though, the cuts to NASA’s Earth Science Division will be so deep that we won’t be able to see the problems anymore, thus rendering them solved. That’s how it works, right?
