How glaciers move — and affect sea level rise

Researchers camp out on the Greenland ice sheet beneath the aurora borealis, or the northern lights. Jessica Mejía hide caption

toggle caption Jessica Mejía

There’s always a moment of intense isolation when Jessica Mejía gets dropped off on the Greenland ice sheet for a multi-week research stint.

“You know you’re very much alone,” says Mejía, a postdoctoral researcher in glaciology at the University of Buffalo. “You just hear kind of the wind, or if the wind dies down, it’s silent.”

Glaciers like the ones in Greenland are melting due to climate change, causing sea levels to rise. That we know. But these glaciers, massive and motionless as they seem, are also moving. What we don’t know is just how these two processes – melting and movement – interact and ultimately impact how quickly sea levels will rise.

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This episode was produced by Berly McCoy, edited by Gisele Grayson and Gabriel Spitzer and fact-checked by Brit Hanson. The audio engineer was Josh Newell.