2012 Glacial Melt Pulse In Greenland So Massive It Bent The Bedrock - 6.68 Billion Tons In All
NASA scientists detected a pulse of melting ice and water traveling through a major glacier in Greenland that was so big that it warped the solid Earth — a surge equivalent in mass to 18,000 Empire State Buildings.
The pulse — which occurred during the 2012 record melt year — traveled nearly 15 miles through the Rink Glacier in western Greenland over four months before reaching the sea, the researchers said. “It’s a gigantic mass,” said Eric Larour, one of the study’s authors and a researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “It is able to bend the bedrock around it.”
Such a “wave” has never before been detected in a Greenland or Antarctic glacier. The total amount of mass carried in the wave — in the form of either water, ice or some combination of both — was 1.67 billion tons per month, or 6.68 billion tons over four months, according to the study, which was published in Geophysical Research Letters.
The study was led by the lab’s Surendra Adhikari and co-authored by Erik Ivins. “These solitary waves, they’re fairly well known in rivers,” said Ivins, also a researcher at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “Rivers can have inundations upstream where a lot of water is collected, and the water gets bunched up as it’s going downstream and doesn’t ever really flatten out. It just remains as this wave and continues down a river.”
EDIT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/05/25/so-much-water-pulsed-through-a-melting-glacier-that-it-warped-the-earths-crust/?utm_term=.69f9ab11c1a1
