Can Rubber Ducks Help Track a Melting Glacier?
Date: 22-Sep-08 Country: US Author: Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent The common yellow plastic bath toys are one part of a sophisticated experiment to determine why glaciers speed up in the summer in their march to the sea, said Alberto Behar of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. The Jakobshavn Glacier is very likely the source of the iceberg that sank the Titanic in 1912 and researchers focus on it because it discharges nearly 7 percent of all the ice coming off Greenland. As the planet warms, its melting ice sheet could make oceans rise this century. “It’s a beautiful place to visit. You can watch these icebergs continuously march across and fall into the ocean,” Behar said. What you can’t see is how melting water moves through the ice. “Right now it’s not understood what causes the glaciers themselves to surge in the summer,” Behar said. One theory is that the summer sun melts ice on the top glacial surface, creating pools that flow into tubular holes in the
