GEUS receives major grant to study how the Greenland ice sheet responds to shrinking top layer “sponge”

Filling in the gap

The changes happening in the Greenland ice sheet’s firn layer are currently not being monitored well enough, according to the team. Most previous firn studies have focused mostly on the highest elevations of the ice sheet, where there is little meltwater. Other studies have focused on the melt zone around the ice-sheet margin. Between these domains lies a vast area of quickly changing firn that researchers know little about.

“FirnMelt is the first large project that focuses on how this area is changing and, even more important, how its changes will affect the entire ice sheet,” says Professor Horst Machguth from the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. He explains that the increasing amount of meltwater from the inner part of the ice sheet could potentially reach the underlying glacier bed through the ice and alter the hydrological system of the entire ice sheet. This could change the velocity at which the ice moves.

“Since changes in ice flow velocity can impact the amount of ice that discharges into the oceans, in the end, this might be changing Greenland’s sea level contribution,” he explains. And not in a positive direction.  

Simulating meltwater runoff from Greenland’s firn into the ocean has been a long-standing challenge within the climate community. Professor Michiel Van den Broeke from Utrecht University in the Netherlands notes that “Recent research has shown that the firn models currently in use are too simplistic and neglect many important processes. Any further improvements require new and innovative observations as well as a new model framework, which is what the FirnMelt project will enable.”

Observations and new projections

According to Professor Van den Broeke, the extreme variability in the Greenland ice sheet hydrology has recently taken the researchers by surprise. Therefore, the FirnMelt team plans extensive activities to get on top of the problem:

• Both airborne and satellite observations.
• New firn measuring stations across the ice sheet accessed by novel traverse vehicles.
• Transforming model frameworks from 1D to 3D.
• Coupling a surface firn model with models of ice sheet hydrology and ice dynamics.
• Using AI to create computationally efficient emulators of complex firn processes.
• Making new projections of the fate of Greenland’s ice sheet all the way to the year 2300.  

All of this will enable the team to produce the most comprehensive ice-sheet hydrology model of Greenland to date.  

“It will be a challenge, but it is THE challenge we need to tackle,” says Professor Angelika Humbert from the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre of Polar and Marine Research in Germany. Luckily, she and the three other professors are not alone in this endeavor. She explains that the project will keep at least 20 senior and early-career researchers busy until 2031, many of them fully engaged by the grant from the ERC.

Welcomes input from colleagues

The FirnMelt team welcomes input and feedback from the research community and will, amongst other outreach activities, arrange an open community Firn Symposium at Utrecht University (more information to come). And just this type of collaboration is a key factor in the projects favored by the ERC. In the ERC Synergy Grant press release published today, the importance of international collaboration is stressed by Ekaterina Zaharieva, European Commissioner for Startups, Research and Innovation:

“Europe’s frontier research has never been so international. This global collaboration strengthens European science, gives our researchers access to world-class expertise and infrastructure, and brings leading scientists from around the world closer to Europe.”

The FirnMelt consortium will make their collected data publicly available throughout the project. Data will also inform the next round of IPCC assessments.