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A study reveals that warming more significantly impacts the firn layer on the Greenland Ice Sheet than cooling, complicating efforts to reverse melting through geoengineering.
“The amount of change that occurs within the firn layer due to warming and cooling is not equal in magnitude,” Megan Thompson-Munson said. “If we look at thousands or millions of years, we see asymmetric ice sheet behavior overall: Ice sheets can melt away quickly, but take a long time to grow. This firn asymmetry we identify is a small piece of that puzzle.
“The warming depletes what we call the ‘firn air content’ or the ‘sponginess,” Thompson-Munson said. “So you lose more of the sponginess due to warming than can be regained due to cooling. And it’s important because this porous firn can buffer the ice sheet’s sea level rise contribution.”To understand how firn responds to both warming and cooling temperatures, the team used a physics-based computer model called SNOWPACK, and honed in on one variable: temperature.
Thompson-Munson said the study brings up an important question regarding geoengineering and the ability to reverse our Earth’s warming. Any geoengineering concepts designed to decrease temperatures in the Arctic might not preserve ice and snow as efficiently as imagined; the degree of cooling will have to exceed the degree of warming to help firn and glaciers return to normal.
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