The accumulation of sea salt and the seepage of warm, salty seawater under ice sheets as glaciers melt accelerate the warming process.
Chlorine and sodium ions within the sediments can, in theory, destabilize underwater permafrost and cause it to melt faster than it would in the absence of salt in the environment. Observations show that, under certain circumstances, table salt can seep and quickly accumulate in the deepest layers of these deposits, which are most vulnerable to the effects of heat. Similar cataclysms have already occurred at the bottom of the Barents Sea and in the waters of the East Siberian Sea and the Laptev Sea.
Also, warm seawater can penetrate under glaciers, and if this causes melting at the bottom of the glacier, then the rate of glacier melt and the resulting sea level rise could be twice as fast as current estimates. Researchers have shown that seawater intrusion into flat or reverse impermeable strata can occur up to tens of kilometers upstream of a glacier from the glacier’s end or line of contact with the land surface.
Fresh meltwater remains close to the temperature of the ice from which it came, but salty seawater that penetrates beneath glaciers can also bring heat from the ocean, which can cause much higher rates of melting at the glacier bottom, the scientific journal The Cryosphere reports.
Both Elbrus and the Himalayas are losing ice cover. In a negative scenario, by the end of the century the Caucasus will lose 85 percent of its glaciers. Accelerated melting is fraught with breakthroughs of periglacial lakes and giant mudflows.
“The reason is climate change. According to the Terskol weather station, in the second decade of the 21st century, the average air temperature in summer increased by 0.7 degrees compared to the first decade. Solar radiation has increased, since there are more clear days, bringing dust from deserts more often. All this accelerates the melting of glaciers,” says Stanislav Kutuzov, leading researcher at the glaciology department at the Institute of Geography of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
The Himalayas have the third largest amount of glacial ice in the world after Antarctica and the Arctic, it is the “third pole of the world.” A study led by scientists from the University of Leeds found that Himalayan glaciers have been losing ice at a significantly faster rate than average in recent decades since the last major glacial expansion 400-700 years ago, a period known as the Little Ice Age.