James Blalog set up time lapse cameras to capture glacial loss in Greenland and elsewhere. I’m not sure he got the results he was expecting. There are some excellent videos on his web site showing that Greenland is not changing much.
Here are a few worth watching :
http://www.extremeicesurvey.org/index.php/new_gallery/timelapse_111/
http://www.extremeicesurvey.org/index.php/new_gallery/timelapse_71/
http://www.extremeicesurvey.org/index.php/new_gallery/timelapse_61/
His videos confirm recent research :
Greenland’s Ice Armageddon Comes To An End
Helheim Glacier’s flow to the sea sped up in 2005, as evidenced by the 5-kilometer retreat of its leading edge, but by 2006 it had slowed back down. Credit: Ian Howat.
“It has come to an end,” Murray said during a session at the meeting. “There seems to have been a synchronous switch-off ” of the speed-up, she said. Based on the shape and appearance of the 14 largest outlet glaciers in southeast Greenland, outlet glacier flows have returned to the levels of 2000 nearly everywhere. “There’s a pattern of speeding up to maximum velocity and then slowing down since 2005,” Murray reported. “It’s amazing; they sped up and slowed down together. They’re not in runaway acceleration.”
Glacial modeler Faezeh Nick of Durham University in the UK and her colleagues found similar behvior when they modeled the flow of Helheim Glacier. In their model, as they report recently in Nature Geoscience, Helheim’s flow is extremely sensitive to disturbances at its margin but can quickly adjust. “Our results imply that the recent rates of mass loss in Greenland’s outlet glaciers are transient,” the group writes, “and should not be extrapolated into the future.”