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Ice lake

Greenland — the world’s largest island — is also home to one of the world’s largest ice sheets (after Antarctica). If Greenland’s two-mile-thick ice sheet melts completely, it would ultimately raise global sea level by 23 feet (7 meters), drowning significant portions of coastal regions under water. In July 2008, a team of four scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the University of Washington returned for their third year to learn how Greenland’s ice sheet is disappearing. The research team investigated glacial lakes, which form atop the ice sheet each spring and summer as returning sunlight melts ice and snow.

(Photo by Chris Linder, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)