Greenland glacier lost 5.4 meters of ice in 13 years

A glacier^*1 in Greenland has lost 5.4 meters of ice in 13 years. Scientists in Japan said this on September 1. Greenland is a very large, cold island in the far north. The glacier is called Qaanaaq Glacier, and it is in the northwest of Greenland.

The study was led by Takuro Imazu, a graduate student^*2, and Professor Shin Sugiyama. They work at Hokkaido University, a university in northern Japan. Scientists from Nagoya University and the National Institute of Polar Research also worked on the study.

The scientists wrote about their work in a paper^*3. The paper was published^*4 online in the Journal of Glaciology on June 18. Money for the research came from Japanese research programs called GRENE and ArCS, and from JSPS, a Japanese group that gives money for science.

The team has been measuring the ice since July 2012. They measure it at six places on the glacier. These places are between 243 and 984 meters above the sea.

In 13 years, the glacier became 5.4 meters thinner. That is about 0.4 meters a year on average^*5. But the amount changed from year to year. In some years, the glacier lost only 0.23 meters. In other years, it lost 1.02 meters.

The team also studied why the ice is disappearing. Warmer air makes the ice disappear much faster. It matters about five times more than snowfall^*6 does. The scientists predict^*7 that the ice will disappear twice as fast if the air becomes 1 degree Celsius^*8 warmer.

The village of Qaanaaq is near the glacier. About 600 people live there. They use water from a river for their daily lives. The river comes from the glacier. In recent years, more ice has melted, and floods^*9 have damaged the village.

1. *1 glacier: a very large river of ice that moves very slowly down a mountain
2. *2 graduate student: a student who has finished university and is studying for a higher degree
3. *3 paper: a written report of a scientific study
4. *4 published: printed or put out so that people can read it
5. *5 on average: the usual amount when you add all the years together and share it out equally
6. *6 snowfall: the snow that falls in a place
7. *7 predict: say what will happen in the future
8. *8 Celsius: a scale for measuring temperature; water freezes at 0 degrees and boils at 100 degrees
9. *9 floods: times when a lot of water covers land that is usually dry