September 10, 2009 COPENHAGEN: Greenland's glaciers are melting into the sea faster than ever before, the environmental pressure group Greenpeace claimed on Wednesday.Glaciers move when melting occurs from the effects of global warming, causing masses of ice to slide into fjords and the sea.Greenland's Helheim glacier, which measures six kilometres wide (four miles) and is one kilometre thick, moves about 25 metres (yards) a day, Greenpeace said in a statement.The group said that is twice as fast as when its Arctic Sunrise vessel last visited Greenland in 2005.The speed of the other major glacier in Greenland, Kangerdlugssuaq, is even more dramatic. It moves some 38 metres a day or 14 kilometres a year, Greenpeace said."Kangerdlugssuaq Glacier is probably the world's fastest moving glacier," said Dr. Gordon Hamilton, from the University of Maine's Climate Change Institute.Hamilton is a member of this year's Greenpeace expedition currently inspecting the glaciers in the north and east of the Danish territory.The group's Arctic Sunrise vessel left for the region at the end of June and is due to complete its mission at the end of September.The two glaciers produce 10 percent of Greenland's ice output into the North Atlantic.Glaciers that shed their ice cause sea levels to rise.Sea levels are currently on the increase by three millimetres a year, according to Greenpeace, and pose a serious threat to people living on islands or in coastal regions.
BAGHDAD: Nearly 500 U.S. Army combat engineers who specialize in clearing roads of explosives started shifting to southern Afghanistan."We are probably going to be the beginning of the influx you are going to see to Afghanistan," Lt. Col. Kevin Landers, commander of the Fort Carson, Colo.-based 4th Engineer Battalion, said as crews packed crates and cleaned vehicles for the flight to Kandahar.Obama has ordered 17,000 more U.S. soldiers and Marines to Afghanistan to bolster the 38,000 American troops already battling the resurgent Taliban."We are going to take this footprint out of Iraq," said Landers, whose battalion received word of its reassignment last month just after taking command of clearing roads in Baghdad of bombs and debris.
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