Here's an interesting page on the people that live there. http://oldharbortribal.org/ohtc/about-us/about-us.html

Strange coincidence, but I was in that area a few years ago. I was part of a delivery crew transporting a boat from San Francisco to Kodiak. On the way we stopped in the town of Old Harbor to drop off a bunch of school supplies for the kids. Old Harbor is a little village of mostly native Americans. It's just across a narrow channel from Sitkalidak Island. The locals are dependent on fish for subsistence. A few fishing guides are also there, but it is so remote that it doesn't really draw in a lot of tourists. We also saw a large pod of orcas and numerous whales in that region. The people were super friendly. It would be a shame to see that place ruined by a spill.

2012 data from Jakobshavn Isbrae show that it has pretty much obliterated all previous speed records. According to the data it was briefly moving at 17000 meters/year in August. http://congrexprojects.com/docs/12c20_docs2/1-joughinesa.pdf?sfvrsn=2 Per the authors: "Much of the speedup appears to be a response to the terminus reaching the bottom of a large overdeepening, which may mean slower speeds as the glacier continues to retreat." Though my understanding is that the glacier retreating into the trough would be a very bad thing.

We're starting to see the end of the "beer cooler effect". As long as the cooler still has ice in it, the beer stays cold. Once the last of the ice melts, the beer gets really warm really fast.

Epsen, I believe that ice is grounded on the Belgica Bank. That area was just mapped in 2004. http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2006/2005GL025131.shtml

We are witnessing the consequences of failing to act decades ago. When I was an undergraduate student in the early 1990's anthropogenic global warming was already a recognized fact. Now what do we do?

Here's another one from July 19, 2003. Perhaps not unusual, but it sure stands out. http://www.fas.org/irp/imint/docs/rst/Sect14/Norway.jpg

Absolutely crazy looking plankton bloom in the Barents Sea. I thought it was an artifact at first. Upwelling? http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/imagery/subsets/?subset=Arctic_r02c05.2012218.terra

Well, this melt may prove to be not very exceptional after all. In fact, based on the forecast it may happen again this weekend.

The Humboldt Glacier has been a scary looking thing for a long time. But it rests above sea level and does not move very quickly. The thing I keep trying to emphasize is that past and current behavior of the Greenland Ice is quite meaningless. When the Arctic Sea Ice is gone that place is going to be a completely different world.

Even if a below sea level bedrock channel into the interior does not exist, that does not mean all is fine and dandy. A slew of publications just came out in recent days describing ice sheet "saddle collapse" as a mechanism that could explain rapid sea level rise. My personal opinion is that everything we are currently witnessing is already totally obsolete. When the sea ice goes arctic conditions are going to change very radically. Predictions need to be made with that in mind. Current thinking tries to extrapolate what the greenland ice cap will do with an ice covered arctic sea. Any realistic person knows that the arctic sea ice is now temporary.

How ironic. I came to this site to report the calving, but obviously others beat me to it. My understanding is that Petermann is so little studied that nobody even knows where the sill is, let alone the details of the glacier bedrock.

This year's Greenland ice melt appears to be blowing all previous records off the hinges. I don't spend too much time focusing on a single year's Greenland melt. Once the arctic sea ice is gone that pesky "heat of fusion" thing with the ice that keeps temperatures "beer cold" will cease to exist. Then arctic temps will skyrocket, exactly as the Pliocene temperature proxies say that it will with 400ppm of co2.

Unfortunately things in the arctic seem to be changing much more quickly then they can be modeled and predicted. I cannot imagine anyone in the year 2002 predicting that we would observe the changes that have occurred in the last ten years.

Despite claims that the "best predictor" is the physical climate models, available evidence suggests that the physical models are not accurate. First, no climate models (to my knowledge) have been able to reproduce the ice loss that has been observed in the last few decades. Second, no climate models (to my knowledge) have been able to reproduce the conditions of the Pliocene. That is essentially the climate forcing we have in place right now today. The models say ice in the arctic. Paleoclimate data says NOT. Given that an important criteria for validating a model is that it should be able to reproduce observed data either the data is wrong or the models are wrong. So far the data is winning two points to one.

This is not simply bad. It really is an unqualified disaster.

Aaron brings up an interesting point that almost never gets mentioned. Ice does in fact behave like a highly viscous fluid. And as the temperature of ice changes this viscosity can vary by many orders of magnitude.

Came across this just published paper which concluded that catastrophic collapse of Jakobshavn is not likely. http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2012/2011JF002110.shtml

Yvan, Luckily the vast vast majority of Greenland is not susceptible to this kind of melting. And until the experts say otherwise it is just speculation. That said, the amount of glacier retreat in the past year is a newsworthy event in and of itself.

The thing that stands out to me is that it appears Jakobshavn Isbrae has retreated beyond it's grounding line. From: http://efdl.cims.nyu.edu/project_oisi/realistic/jakobshavn/environment/glaciology/overview.html "The JIG flows through a deep channel eroded in the bedrock (see Fig. 4). The channel has a depth of 700 m near the ice front and drops to near 2600 m further inland (Ramamoorthy, 2004)." And here's a great bed elevation image: https://cms.cresis.ku.edu/sites/default/files/images/Jakobshavn_Bed_Topography.jpg This link describes the radar technology used to produce that image: http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/environment/a-nextgeneration-ice-radar/0 Looks like it's all downhill for dozens of kilometers back from here. I have to believe we'll be seeing a press release in the coming months.