A century later, Titanic's nemesis is alive and kicking

February 04, 2014 16:27

Remember the Titanic? Sure, yes, the James Cameron film that chronicled the tragedy of what was in 1912 the world's largest and most luxurious liner, that met its match in an iceberg?

Well, Steve Connor reports in The Independent, London, that 'the Greenland glacier that was thought to have been responsible for the sinking of the Titanic is moving four times faster into the sea than it was in 1960s and its instability could result in it moving at 10 times the speed by the end of the century,' quoting a study.

'The Jakobshavn Glacier in the south-west of Greenland, which is believed to have produced the iceberg that sank the Titanic in 1912, is now the fastest moving glacier in the world as a result of a rapid increase in the rate at which the massive Greenland ice sheet is melting,' Connor writes.

'The Jakobshavn Glacier drains about 6.5 per cent of the Greenland ice sheet and produces about 10 per cent of Greenland icebergs, amounting to about 35 billion tons of floating ice that eventually melt in the open ocean,' Connor points out.

He adds that satellite measurements from space show that last summer the glacier moved at a record speed of 17 kilometres a year, or more than 46 metres per day. Scientists said the speed is unprecedented for any glacier or ice stream in Greenland, the rest of the Arctic or the Antarctic, he further reports.

What does this mean for us, you say? Connor quotes Ian Joughin, lead author of the anove-mentioned study and a researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle, to say that the glacier 'is pushing more and more ice into the ocean, causing an acceleration in the rate at which it is contributing to rising sea levels'. 'From 2000 to 2010 this glacier alone increased sea level by about 1 millimetre. With the additional speed it likely will contribute a bit more than this over the next decade,' Dr Joughin points out, here.

So imagine global warming, ocean levels rising, and the accompanying images of apocalypse, that's what this means.

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