Atop the ice sheet covering the Arctic island of Greenland, you now see dramatic melting in the summer. It forms lakes, rivers and even dangerous “moulins” in the ice where rivers suddenly plunge into the thick ice sheet, carrying water deep below. East Antarctica is supposed to be different. It is extremely remote and cold. It doesn’t see such warm temperatures in the summer — yet — and so its ice tends to remain more pristine. “Many people refer to East Antarctica as being too cold for significant melt,” says Jan Lenaerts, a glaciologist with the Utrecht University in the Netherlands. “I mean there’s marginal melt in summer, but there’s not a lot.” That’s the common wisdom, at least, but it is challenged in a new study in Nature Climate Change , by Lenaerts and his colleagues from universities in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany. They do so based […]