The melting of the Greenland ice sheet is speeding up and 2012
already seems to be a record year in terms of this thawing. The
potential consequences of this melt on the climate and on the
rise of sea levels are such that the island of Greenland and its
ice sheet have been the subject of close monitoring by
researchers for a number of years. One of them, Xavier Fettweis,
a climatology researcher at the University of Liège, has
developed a mathematical model which studies different possible
scenarios. Whilst this model confirms the acceleration of the
thawing, it does not yet take into consideration a factor which
has just been revealed in the journal Nature by American
researchers working in part on the basis of venturing beyond the
model designed by Xavier Fettweis. In this publication, the
American researchers (from the Universities of Colorado, Wyoming
and Montana) stress the importance of what is called a
'percolation zone': the meltwater does not immediately join the
oceans but infiltrates the empty spac