Greenland ice slipping away but not all that quickly
Almost 6 years ago, a paper in Science warned of an unheralded environmental peril. Melted snow and ice seemed to be reaching the base of the great Greenland ice sheet, lubricating it and accelerating the sheet's slide toward oblivion in the sea, where it was raising sea level worldwide (12 July 2002, p. 218). Now a two-pronged study-both broader and more focused than the one that sounded the alarm-has confirmed that meltwater reaches the ice sheet's base and does indeed speed the ice's seaward flow. The good news is that the process is more leisurely than many climate scientists had feared.