Water

The Greenland Ice Sheet

Greenland, the green land, named this way by Eric the Red in the 10th century, to encourage the Vikings to colonize the land. At the time, in fact, it was truly green, however the subsequent advance of  ice forced the colons to abandon the island : only the Inuits survived the Little Ice Age. The Greenland Ice Sheet occupies seven eights of the island, with a surface area of 1.73 million km2 and a volume of 2.6 million km3, leaving only a small mountainous coastal strip that limits and “contains” the ice-sheet. The ice thickness is 1,790 m on average, but in some parts it is over 3,000 m, culminating in two domes that are 3,300 m high. Many tongues flow out of the ice-sheet, but due to the mountainous characteristics of the coast, only few are able to reach the sea, therefore Greenland practically has no ice shelves. One of the most important outlet glaciers is the Jakobshavn Glacier, a real factory of an enormous number of icebergs. It is the fastest glacier in the world, and near its front it moves at an impressive speed of 1 m per hour, producing continuous collapses and an enormous quantity of icebergs, over 20 million tons per year. Icebergs falling into the sea from the fronts can provoke tsunamis up to 10 m high. The iceberg that sank the Titanic originated in Greenland.
Since December 2002 the thickness of the Greenland Ice Sheet is monitored by the NASA satellite ICE Sat , which also monitors the Antarctic ice with laser equipment that can measure up to 1 cm variations in thickness.