Jakobshavn Glacier

Aerial view of the Jakobshavn Isbræ. The lines mark the progressive retreat of the calving front of the glacier, West Greenland 1851-2006.

The Jakobshavn Isbræ ( grönl.: Sermeq Kujalleq, "Southern Glacier ") is a near Greenland Ilulissat ( Jakobshavn Danish ) situated outlet glaciers. The glacier provides a significant part of the Greenland ice dar. Its catchment area covers about 6.5 % of the inland ice. His ice flows into the Ilulissat ice fjord on the west coast of Greenland. The mass of icebergs that crumbles per year from its glacier tongue, adds up to 35 billion tons; thus the glacier calves most commonly on the entire northern hemisphere. Individual icebergs can thereby be several kilometers long and up to a kilometer high.

Glacier melt

Since at least 1850, the Jakobshavn Isbræ withdraws. In the wake of the global glacier melt as a consequence of global warming in the Arctic this ice stream between 2000 and 2010 did so much ice to the sea, that he alone has caused a sea level rise of one millimeter.

Dynamics

With flow rates of 7000 meters per year, the glacier is considered the fastest-flowing ice stream permanently in the world. Only so-called surge glacier can flow even faster for a limited time. After a several -decade long period of relative stability, the flow rate of the glacier has increased dramatically since the late 1990s, while the floating tongue of the glacier, more and more lost in thickness and is falling apart. Since the glacier has lost its floating tongue, he shows clear seasonal variations: In winter, the glacier flows slowly, the calving front comes across before; in summer, the glacier is faster and the front retracts. The in recent years on the glacier end continuous rise in flow rate influences more and more the higher-lying areas of the glacier, and this also loses thickness. In the summer of 2012 kilometers above the glacier end was measured the highest ever flow rate, the rate was 46.8 m per day and is considered the largest ever recorded speed of a Auslassgletschers in Greenland or Antarctica. The averaged over the year 2012 flow rate was on average three times as high as the mid-1990s.

Trivia

The iceberg with which the Titanic collided in 1912, probably came from the Jakobshavn Isbræ. This is also an attraction for tourists; so visited in 2008, approximately 20,000 people of the glacier.