September 10, 2009—As officials meet in Denmark to prepare for the successor to the Kyoto Protocol, scientists in the Danish territory of Greenland warn of accelerated glacial loss, which could boost sea levels.

© 2009 National Geographic (AP)

Unedited Transcript:

As five European foreign ministers meet in Copenhagen to prepare for an agreement to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, scientists in Greenland are warning about accelerated glacier melts. Several years ago, scientists reported that the Helheim Glacier, suddenly and without warning, had begun accelerating, spitting icebergs ever faster into the ocean off southeastern Greenland.

In just two years, it doubled its speed. Other Greenland glaciers made similar accelerations.

Now, theres a bit of good news, but a lot of uncertainty. The accelerated movement has diminished, but a climate scientist who has clocked Helheim glacier with GPS receivers for five years, says theres no less concern about a collapse of Greenlands ice sheet.

SOUNDBITE: (English) Gordon Hamilton, University of Maine "Glaciers like this one here, Helheim glacier, have accelerated their flow speed and that's important because they are like conveyor belts that move mass out of the middle of the ice sheet and take it down to the Fjord behind us, the ocean behind us. When they get to the end they discharge ice-bergs into the ocean and that ice displaces sea water which causes sea level rise in the same way that melting ice and turning it into liquid water causes sea level rise."

Helheim is a fast-moving glacier, flowing at around 6-and-a-half miles per year. The extremely rapid rate of flow has slowed recently, but is still much faster than in decades past.

SOUNDBITE: (English) Gordon Hamilton, University of Maine "The Greenland ice sheet contains about 7 meters of sea level equivalent. In other words if you were to completely to get rid of the Greenland ice sheet and put all the ice that's frozen on the land's surface as liquid water into the ocean then sea levels around the world would be about 7 meters higher than they are today. Now scientists like me don't foresee a compete collapse of the ice sheet in certainly our life times and probably not for a few centuries so that 7 meter sea level rise scenario is not something we can expect any time soon but let's just say that if a small part of the ice sheet were to collapse and we got a rise of sea level by 1 meter that would have enormous implications for societies around the world, especially societies clustered near the coasts."

Other researchers say some, but not all, of Greenland's glaciers have showed similar slowdowns in recent years, suggesting that a sudden, dramatic increase in flow speeds may not be such a cataclysmic and irregular phenomenon after all.

Still, the flows remain fast enough to yield a net loss of mass from the ice sheet. And if the world continues to warm, sudden spurts of glacial acceleration may become more frequent, draining the inland ice until it, eventually, collapses.