Greenland appears to be melting faster.  However, priorities are shifting towards oil drilling in these new accessible areas, which is now possible because due to accelerated melting. From International Herald Tribune, France:

Along the flanks in spring and summer, however, the picture is very different. For a lengthening string of warm years, a lacework of blue lakes and rivulets of meltwater have been spreading ever higher on the ice cap. The melting surface darkens, absorbing up to four times as much energy from the sun as unmelted snow, which reflects sunlight. Natural drainpipes, called moulins, carry water from the surface into the depths, in some places reaching bedrock. The process slightly, but measurably, lubricates and accelerates the grinding passage of ice toward the sea….

Some say they fear that the rise in seas in a warming world could be much greater than the upper estimate of about two feet in this century made last year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (Seas rose less than a foot, or 30 centimeters, in the 20th century.) The panel’s assessment did not include factors known to contribute to ice flows but not understood well enough to estimate with confidence. All the panel could say was, “Larger values cannot be excluded.”

What is the point of drilling for oil when sea level rise threatens coastal cities that are at the mercy of tidal action? Cities like New York and London. From Forbes, NY:

Greenland’s Bureau of Mines and Petroleum last week awarded oil and gas leases for tracts off its west coast, which is already free of ice for at least five months out of the year. The agency is now in the early stages of planning a similar sale for the northeast and northwest coasts, where exploration is difficult to impossible, even in summer months.

“There’s a lot of sea ice in those areas, but that sea ice is melting,” said Jorn Skov Nielsen, the department’s deputy minister. “I definitely think we can have a licensing round in 2012, that will be an appropriate time to start exploration.”

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