Iceland’s glaciers are melting as a consequence of climate change, but the rate of loss has fallen in the past decade, perhaps because a blob of cold water in the Atlantic is cooling the island
Environment
11 February 2022
Skaftafellsjökull glacier in Vatnajokull National Park, Iceland Guitar photographer/Shutterstock
Iceland’s glaciers are melting more slowly than expected because they are close to a “cool blob” of water in the North Atlantic Ocean.
Brice Noël at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and his colleagues devised a model to reconstruct the shrinking of Iceland’s glaciers between 1958 and the present day. The model was based on regional data from the surrounding North Atlantic, as well as atmospheric data and information from the glaciers themselves.
The team then used this information to …