Read here. There was a period during early 21st century when Greenland's ice mass reduction was happening due to its southeastern outlet glaciers melting and retreating. Most IPCC related alarmists claimed this was evidence of the infamous climate "tipping point" and predicted imminent catastrophic sea level rises would result.
Around 2006 the glacier retreats came to a screeching halt, thus stabilizing the ice sheet mass wastage and putting a lid on the typical alarmist's refrain that the Greenland ice sheet was disappearing. What stopped the glaciers melting? It was a natural, climatic negative feedback that took place (not the alarmist predicted, positive feedback induced tipping point).
A 2010 peer-reviewed study [Murray, T. et al. 2010] found that warm waters from the Atlantic were causing the melting of the glaciers; the melt waters from the glaciers decreased the temperatures of the surrounding waters thus the glaciers were no longer in contact with warm waters and the melting stopped.
"Murray et al. (eleven researchers) present evidence that suggests that the original ice wastage speedup "was the result of warm ocean waters coming into contact with the glaciers," and that this speedup "was probably terminated in part by increased discharge from the glaciers themselves, which increased ice sheet runoff and iceberg calving" that in turn "introduced additional cold water strengthening the East Greenland Coastal Current," which slowed glacier melting until warmer water again began to dominate the Current's waters.....write that their findings are suggestive of "a negative feedback that currently mitigates against continued very fast loss of ice from the ice sheet in a warming climate," and they thus conclude that "we should expect similar speedup and slowdown events of these glaciers in the future, which will make it difficult to elucidate any underlying trend in mass loss resulting from changes in this sector of the ice sheet." [Murray, T., Scharrer, K., James, T.D., Dye, S.R., Hanna, E., Booth, A.D., Selmes, N., Luckman, A., Hughes, A.L.C., Cook, S. and Huybrechts, P. 2010]
Additional ice sheet postings. Negative/positive feedback postings. Other peer-reviewed postings.
