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To: secretagent
Evidently not so apparent.
103 posted on 12/12/2006 3:51:58 PM PST by jwalsh07
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To: jwalsh07
Efforts to measure changes in the Greenland Ice Sheet using field observations, aircraft and satellites have improved scientific knowledge during the last decade, but there is still no consensus assessment of the ice sheet's overall mass balance. There is however evidence of melting and thinning in the coastal marginal areas in recent years, as well as indications that large Greenland outlet glaciers can surge, possibly in response to climate variations.

So according to your linked site, no consensus. Increased interior ice, and decreased perimeter ice.

Using more recent data:

The critical point for Greenland is whether the increased rate of glacier motion more than compensates for the greater accumulation on the surface. While the broad picture of what is happening is consistent between these papers, the bottom-line value for Greenland's mass balance is different in all three cases. Looking just at the dynamical changes observed by Rignot & Kanagaratnam, there is an increased discharge of about 0.28 mm/year SLE from 1996 to 2005, well outside the range of error bars. This is substantially more than the opposing changes in accumulation estimated by Johannessen et al and Zwally et al, and is unlikely to have been included in their assessments. Thus, the probability is that Greenland has been losing ice in the last decade. We should be careful to point out though that this is only for one decade, and doesn't prove anything about the longer term. As many of the studies make clear, there is a significant degree of interannual variability (related to the North Atlantic Oscillation, or the response to the cooling associated with Mt. Pinatubo) such that discerning longer term trends is hard.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/03/greenland-ice-and-other-glaciers/

Again, it looks like no consensus of loss or gain.

106 posted on 12/12/2006 5:49:21 PM PST by secretagent
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