The world's largest island is shrinking and shifting

Greenland, the world's largest island, is shrinking and moving northwest due to melting ice.

View of the capital Nuuk, Greenland - Photo: PENGUINTRAMPOLINE

Since the peak of the last Ice Age about 20,000 years ago, melting ice has reduced pressure on the land, causing tectonic plates and bedrock deep beneath Greenland to deform, according to IFLSciencce on October 16.

As a result, Greenland has gotten a little smaller. However, the effect is not uniform across the island, with some parts shrinking and compressing while others are stretching and expanding.

Because of this geological upheaval, Greenland is also on the move. The team found that the island has been moving northwest over the past 20 years at a rate of about 2cm/year.

“Overall, this means Greenland is getting a little smaller, but that could change in the future given the accelerating melting we are seeing,” said lead author Danjal Longfors Berg, of the Technical University of Denmark and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Greenland, 2.1 million ^square kilometers in size, sits on the North American tectonic plate. These tectonic plates are large pieces of the Earth's crust that slowly move over the planet's mantle – a layer of extremely hot, semi-liquid rock that moves slowly over time.

As the ice sheets continue to melt, the enormous weight of the land mass is reduced by the crust and mantle below. This causes Greenland to shift. Depending on the amount of ice melting and the composition of the bedrock, some parts of the island will rise and stretch, while others will compress and sink, creating a geological movement.

To explore these movements, the team analyzed data from 58 GPS stations scattered along the edge of Greenland.

Data on the island's position, bedrock elevation changes and altered landforms over time were fed into a model that calculates long-term geological movements over the past 26,000 years, with precise GPS measurements over the past 20 years.

Thanks to that, the research team was able to measure Greenland's displacement precisely.

The research is published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth .

ANH THU

Source: https://tuoitre.vn/dao-lon-nhat-the-gioi-dang-nho-lai-va-dich-chuyen-20251017150930846.htm