Fastest glacier in Greenland doubles speed

The world's fastest glacier, Greenland's Jakobshavn Isbrae, doubled its speed between 1997 and 2003. The rapid movement of ice from land into the sea provides key evidence of newly discovered relationships between ice sheets, sea level rise and climate warming.
The glacier's sudden speed-up also coincides with very rapid thinning, up to 49 feet of ice per year after 1997, according to research published in the Dec. 2 issue of the journal Nature. Along with increased rates of ice flow and thinning, the thick ice that extends from the mouth of the glacier into the ocean, called the ice tongue, began retreating in 2000, breaking up almost completely by May 2003.