| Kong Oscar Glacier | |
|---|---|
Natural-colour image showing the heavily crevassed terminus of the Kong Oscar Glacier. |
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| Location | Greenland |
| Area | 21,134 km2 (8,200 sq mi) |
| Terminus | Melville Bay |
Kong Oscar Glacier is one of several glaciers that drain the north-western part of the Greenland Ice Sheet[1] into Melville Bay. As part of a comprehensive survey of Greenland’s glaciers that was published in 2006, scientists documented that the mass balance—the sum of gains through snow accumulation and losses through iceberg calving and melting—of Kong Oscar and Greenalnd’s other north-western glaciers was strongly negative between 1996 and 2005: they lost more ice than they gained[1]. The pattern was similar to the ice sheet as a whole, which has been losing ice mass at an accelerating pace in the past decade[1].