Hundreds of Greenland’s glacial lakes have burst since 2008

Thousands of lakes dot Greenland’s coast, their waters held back by walls of ice. But sometimes, the meltwater can surge through and spill into the sea. The first survey of its kind has found a 1200 per cent increase in the number of such leaky lakes compared with how many had previously been documented to burst, which could help better model sea level rise.

The biggest factor in this spike is underreporting, according to the researchers, but it is possible that a rapidly warming Arctic has played…