Unless you’ve been hibernating under a rock for the past few decades, you’ve unarguably heard about climate change, a phenomenon by which the Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, stores of ice, and other parts of the environment are changing at an alarming rate, more quickly than they have ever changed before.
While some people believe that these changes in things such as global ocean temperature and the severity of weather events are totally natural and not related to humans’ activities in the past few hundred years, climatologists, oceanographers, and other scientists widely agree that humans are directly harming the environment and effectively ruining the balance of planet Earth and its contents.
One of the parts of climate change, a collection of changes across the Earth and its contents, is the shrinking of the stores of polar ice across both the Arctic Circle and the Antarctic Circle, located on the northernmost and southernmost portions of the planet. This is directly related to an increase in the Earth’s temperature, alleged to be a result of the widespread, highly-accelerated release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, Greenhouse gases, as their name might tell you, are responsible for increasing the characteristic of Earth to trap heat from the Sun inside its atmosphere.
Glaciers are also a major part of the massive, rapid reduction in the world’s collective body of ice. Glaciers, which are huge chunks of ice that are found atop of land, have been melting all around the world over the past few decades.
Now, it’s time to get to the latest research regarding the swelling of one of the largest glaciers on the planet.
Greenland, one of the iciest countries on the planet, is home to the Jakobshavn Glacier. It’s been melting like crazy over the past 20 years, give or take.
NASA recently showed that the glacier has been growing as of recent, believe it or not.
While NASA also indicated that the Jakobshavn Glacier has been losing more mass than it’s been putting on as a result of its ice melting faster than snow can pack on top of it, it’s not thinning or receding. It’s headed toward the ocean and getting a lot thicker.
Unfortunately, this phenomenon isn’t going to happen forever. According to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA, the glacier has been doing well as of late as a result of tons of cold ocean water. These currents first came around in 2016, though the pattern will soon reverse – just wait anywhere between five and 20 years.
