Jakobshavn Glacier and the solitary swallow

After reading R. Colmore's letter "This glacier is growing" (The Weekend Sun, Friday October 4, 2019, pg 26) I did an interweb search on Google, Duckduckgo and Bing for "glacier shrinkage" and found that the Franz Josef Glacier has its own website and that not only is it shrinking, but also glaciers in Alaska and Iceland as well (I didn't go beyond the first page of results). I also did a search on "Jakobshavn Glacier" and discovered as I expected, it was on Greenland's west coast, facing Canada.

If glaciers as far from each other as Alaska and New Zealand are shrinking, then Jakobshavn Glacier's growth must be explained in the context of Greenland's local environment. I suspect its growth is due to the cold fresh water coming south from the melting Arctic ice cap.

There's an English proverb, "A single swallow does not a summer make", which I think applies in this case. Science deals in trends; outliers are special cases, unless they show critical errors in the relevant theories. Which this example doesn't.

Wesley Parish, Bellevue.

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