Eric Rignot Quotes (11 Quotes)

In the future, as warming around Greenland progresses further north, we expect additional losses from northwest Greenland glaciers, which will then increase Greenland's contribution to sea level rise.

The behavior of the glaciers that dump ice into the sea is the most important aspect of understanding how an ice sheet will evolve in a changing climate. It takes a long time to build and melt an ice sheet, but glaciers can react quickly to temperature changes.

A few years back, we thought ice sheets might grow because of increased precipitation. Now we see that rates of glacier flow are changing. We think the process that is winning overall is the rate of glacier flow.

What it means right now is that Greenland is producing 20 percent of the sea rise. We think that contribution will increase from generation to generation.

We don't think these are just bursts. We haven't seen any of these glaciers coming back to normal.

These findings call into question predictions of the future of Greenland in a warmer climate from computer models that do not include variations in glacier flow as a component of change. Actual changes will likely be much larger than predicted by these models.

I think this will heighten concerns that maybe the sea-level models are a little too conservative.

The mass loss resulting from this glacier acceleration in Greenland is very significant. These are very active glaciers. They all end up in the ocean, discharge icebergs and are very dynamic. One you push them a little bit out of equilibrium, they start retreating very fast.

This is raising concern on the effects of the polar caps.

We are witnessing enormous changes, and it will take some time before we understand how it happened, although it is clearly a result of warming around the glaciers.

The Greenland ice sheet's contribution to sea level is an issue of considerable societal and scientific importance.