In a bit of over two weeks, greater than 3,000 billion liters of water not too long ago flooded out of an ice-dammed lake in East Greenland. It’s the primary time scientists have intently documented such an occasion and their insights may assist to uncover how outburst flooding may wreak havoc elsewhere on the earth.
The incident unfolded earlier this yr between September 23 and October 11 at Greenland’s Catalina Lake, a proglacial lake that’s located in a valley blocked by the huge Edward Bailey Glacier.
Water has been accumulating within the lake over the previous 20 years, but it surely not too long ago reached a crucial level, inflicting the glacier to raise up. A 25-kilometer (15.5-mile) lengthy tunnel was naturally carved beneath the ice, transporting a huge quantity of lake water towards the world’s largest fjord, Scoresby Sound. Back at Catalina Lake, water ranges plummeted by 154 meters (505 ft).
All of this was watched intently in real-time utilizing satellite tv for pc imagery by scientists from the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute.
“In this case, the vitality launched by the glacier flood was equal to the output of the world’s largest nuclear energy plant working at full capability for 22 days,” Aslak Grinsted, a local weather researcher on the Niels Bohr Institute, stated in a press release.
The occasion is what’s generally known as a glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF). As this occasion exhibits, the breakdown of an ice-dammed lake could be triggered by pure causes, together with the buildup of water, erosion, heavy snow or rain, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions.
GLOF occasions will also be sparked by human-driven local weather change, attributable to thawing glaciers within the wake of rising temperatures.
“The hazard from glacier-dammed lakes is growing on account of world warming. It’s important to enhance our understanding of this phenomenon to difficulty well timed warnings ought to there be an imminent threat,” defined Grinsted.
The newest flooding in East Greenland was lucky within the sense that the encompassing area is sparsely populated, so the chance to people was minimal. However, there are many proglacial lakes on the earth that loom over extremely populated areas. A 2023 research concluded that 15 million folks internationally are vulnerable to lethal glacial floods, primarily in India, Pakistan, Peru, and China.
“I anticipate that we are going to witness outbursts from even bigger ice-dammed lakes as Greenland’s ice sheet retreats in coming centuries. At the top of the final Ice Age, Lake Missoula had an outburst that was 2,500 instances bigger than the current Catalina occasion. To perceive these large forces, we should research the most important outbursts once they happen,” added Grinsted.
It isn’t all pessimistic, although. The researchers level out that the immense quantity of vitality launched by GLOFs has raised the prospect of exploring the outbursts as a supply of inexperienced vitality. The vitality not too long ago launched from the Catalina Lake occasion may have constantly offered 50 megawatts of electrical energy, sufficient to fulfill the wants of a small city. It wouldn’t be simple to construct the infrastructure essential to harness the ability in a spot like Greenland, but it surely’s a tantalizing concept.
“As with many different pure assets in Greenland, infrastructure is an issue. But if a superb engineer may determine learn how to harness these meltwater outbursts, there’s huge energy and vitality potential in them,” concludes Grinsted.
