Sea-level projections may have been too high and it might be good news about Greenland's melting

By HENRY FOUNTAIN and DEREK WATKINS of The NY Times. Excerpts:

"A key finding — that not as much meltwater flows immediately through the ice sheet and drains to the ocean as previously estimated — may have implications for sea-level rise, one of the major effects of climate change.

The scientists say it appears that some of the meltwater is retained in porous ice instead of flowing to the bottom of the ice sheet and out to sea.

“It’s always treated as a parking lot, water runs straight off,” said Laurence C. Smith, a geographer at the University of California, Los Angeles who led the field work in 2015. “What we found is that it appears there is water retention.”

“It’s plausible that this is quite an important process, which could render sea-level projections too high,” he added."

The work involved setting up camp near a glacial river that drains meltwater from a surrounding catchment area — in this case about 24 square miles of the ice sheet — into a moulin, a hole that drains to the base of the ice sheet. The researchers suspended a device in the river that uses acoustic signals to gauge the flow, and used satellite and drone images to precisely calculate the catchment area.

The flow data, collected over 72 hours, showed that current models are overestimating the amount of runoff by 20 percent to nearly 60 percent. Were the models wrong? Or were they right about the total amount of melting, but some of the water was not running off?

When he first sent the results to modelers, Dr. Smith said, “they couldn’t believe it.” After months of back-and-forth, Dr. Smith and his colleagues concluded that the model estimates were accurate, but there was something else going on with some of the meltwater. “What is missing,” he said, “is a physical process that is not currently considered by the models — water retention in ice.”

Sunlight hitting the ice sheet melts the surface, Dr. Smith said, but some of the light reaches deeper into the ice and causes some melting there. The ice develops a rotted, porous texture -- and can, the findings suggest, hold on to some of the meltwater.

Marco Tedesco, a co-author of a paper on the work in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences who is a modeler at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, part of Columbia University, said when comparing models with actual field measurements, “you always look at the energy involved.”

“If there’s a mismatch between observation and model,” Dr. Tedesco said, “that means the model is moving the mass in one way or another and not respecting the way things happen in the real world.”"

"But surface runoff is only one area where much remains to be learned. What happens at the bottom of the ice when meltwater reaches it is understood largely through modeling, and those processes can affect how fast the ice sheet moves — and thus how much ice calves off into the ocean.

Among other aspects that scientists are studying is bioalbedo, which is how the growth of microorganisms in the ice can darken the surface and affect how fast it melts."