NASA scientists reading signals from a satellite in orbit, and flying aboard a low-flying plane over Greenland, are finding fresh evidence of melting snows and thinning glaciers in vast areas of the massive island. Their observations confirm the climate's warming trend in the far northern reaches of the world, they say, where changes in the circulation of waters feeding into the Arctic Ocean are altering crucial patterns of ocean currents there with effects that are increasingly uncertain.
The pace of glaciers sliding into the sea along Greenland's southwestern coast "is speeding like gangbusters this year," said William Krabill, leader of a NASA team that has just ended a three-week airborne mission probing glacier dynamics with lasers and radar.
EDIT
And while the glaciers are on the move, Greenland's snows have been melting over large areas of the ice sheet, according to Marco Tedesco, a research scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center who has been working on a joint climate study project with the University of Maryland. Data from a Defense Department meteorology satellite show that last spring the snow on Greenland melted over an area of more than 375,000 square miles -- nearly 2 1/2 times the surface area of California, Tedesco said Friday in a telephone interview. That was far more than the island's average summertime snowmelt area of 350,000 square miles, he said.
Eighteen years of the satellite observations have shown that while the fluctuating trend of melting ice continues, Tedesco said, last summer didn't set the all-time record for snowmelt area on Greenland's surface. For example, five summers ago the melting snow covered more than 540,000 square miles -- nearly 3 1/2 times California's area, he said. The satellite data also showed that last summer the island experienced more days of melting snow and at higher altitudes than the average of all the past years -- particularly in the southern part of the island, he said.
EDIT
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/06/02/MNG4VQ6A0B1.DTL