Earth's internal heat driving Greenland's ice melt

London: An international team of geoscientists has found that Greenland sits over an area of abnormally hot mantle material that drives a widespread melting beneath the ice sheet and rapid ice flow over a distance of several hundred kilometres.

The researchers led by Irina Rogozhina and Alexey Petrunin from GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences had to go far back into the Earth's history to explain the reason for the melting base of the world's second largest ice sheet. Their observations from radar and ice core drilling data indicated the melt from below and the rapid ice flow over a distance of 750 kms from the summit area of the Greenland ice sheet to the North Atlantic Ocean.