The Team That First Found Greenland's Ice Plumes Just Weighed In — It's Much Worse

Deep under north Greenland, radar shows towers of ice taller than two Empire State Buildings, bending layers that took tens of thousands of years to settle. This year, the team that believes it has cracked them showed what they need to exist: deep ice about ten times softer than the ice in the standard models.

This video follows the towers from a convection model in Bergen, Norway, back to NASA's 2014 radar flights and Robin Bell's "tortured ice", and then to the question the finding raises: are the sea level forecasts matching Greenland for the wrong reason? From there to Petermann Glacier, where the grounding line slides up to 6 kilometers with the tides, to the northeast ice stream that thinned far further inland than the models allowed, and on to East Antarctica, where the same recipe may apply.

The researchers say softer ice does not necessarily mean faster melting. Whether the towers are still rising today has not been measured yet.

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SOURCES

Law, Born, Voigt, MacGregor & Guimond, "Exploring the conditions conducive to convection within the Greenland Ice Sheet," The Cryosphere 20, 1071, 2026

https://tc.copernicus.org/articles/20/1071/2026/

University of Bergen, "The ice on Greenland is acting strangely. Scientists believe they finally know why" (EurekAlert, 16 February 2026)

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1116741

BBC Science Focus, "Something very strange is happening under Greenland's ice" (28 February 2026)

https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/something-strange-greenland-ice-sheet

ScienceAlert, "'Freak of Nature': Scientists Think Greenland's Ice Is Churning Like Molten Rock" (21 February 2026)

https://www.sciencealert.com/freak-of-nature-scientists-think-greenlands-ice-is-churning-like-molten-rock

Bell et al., "Deformation, warming and softening of Greenland's ice by refreezing meltwater," Nature Geoscience, 2014

https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo2179

Columbia Climate School, "Melting and Refreezing of Deep Greenland Ice Speeds Flow to Sea, Study Says" (15 June 2014)

https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2014/06/15/melting-and-refreezing-of-deep-greenland-ice-speeds-flow-to-sea-study-says/

Scientific American, "Weird Layer-Cake Warps Found in Greenland's Ice" (2014)

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/weird-layer-cake-warps-found-in-greenland-s-ice/

Ciracì et al., "Melt rates in the kilometer-size grounding zone of Petermann Glacier, Greenland, before and during a retreat," PNAS, 2023

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2220924120

UC Irvine / NASA JPL, "Researchers discover a cause of rapid ice melting in Greenland" (8 May 2023)

https://www.ess.uci.edu/news/1174

Khan et al., "Extensive inland thinning and speed-up of Northeast Greenland Ice Stream," Nature, 2022

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05301-z

DTU, "Ice loss from Northeastern Greenland significantly underestimated" (9 November 2022)

https://www.dtu.dk/english/newsarchive/2022/11/ice-loss-from-northeastern-greenland-significantly-underestimated

NSIDC, "Ice Sheet Quick Facts"

https://nsidc.org/learn/parts-cryosphere/ice-sheets/ice-sheet-quick-facts

Discovering Antarctica, "Regional climate variation and weather"

https://discoveringantarctica.org.uk/oceans-atmosphere-landscape/atmosphere-weather-and-climate/regional-climate-variation-and-weather/

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