A massive chunk of ice, a new laser, and new information on sea-level rise
For nearly a decade, Leigh Stearns and collaborators aimed a laser scanner system at Greenland’s Helheim Glacier. Their long-running survey reveals that Helheim’s massive calving events don’t behave the way scientists once thought, reframing how ice loss contributes to sea-level rise.
Ten years ago, glaciologist Leigh Stearns traveled to her favorite six-kilometer-wide chunk of ice, Greenland’s Helheim Glacier.
As in previous trips, she and her colleagues sought new data on how ocean processes influence glacier behavior. With the continued mass loss of the Greenland Ice Sheet contributing to sea level rise, they wanted to better understand the cause and effect of large iceberg calving events—spectacular and often violent phenomena wherein gargantuan, cliff-like slabs of ice shear off Helheim’s face and plunge into the ocean.
On this trip, Stearns, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and her collaborators worked with the U.S. Army’s Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL), to install an autonomous laser scanner system (ATLAS)—a Greenland first. Read more about their research and work within Penn Today.