Like a snake slithering back into its den, Greenland’s lengthy Jakobshavn glacier has retreated over 25 miles since the 19th century. And for the last two decades, this warming river of ice has purged more ice into to sea than any other Greenland glacier. 

But since 2016 — and after 20 years of unprecedented melting in Greenland — Jakobshavn’s rapid retreat has slowed down considerably. This might appear to be a rare dose of good news for the Arctic — a place that’s heated up over twice as much as the rest of the planet. 

But no.

Instead, a team researchers led by scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory discovered that Jakobshavn’s stagnated melt is only a temporary blip brought on by cooler ocean currents. Though worryingly, the recent slowing also carries ominous news for the thawing landmass. The research, published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience, reveals that the Jakobshavn glacier — whose ice reaches some 2,600 feet under the sea — is extremely sensitive to changes in ocean temperature. That’s a big problem because the dynamic ocean currents off western Greenland will naturally warm up again — on top of the reality that Earth’s absorbent seas soak up over 90 percent of the planet’s accumulating heat. These incessantly warming waters spell a grimmer future for both Jakobshavn and Earth’s rising seas.

“The big story here is the ocean,” said Josh Willis, a study coauthor who heads NASA’s Oceans Melting Greenland mission. “The ocean is playing a powerful role in driving the ice loss in Greenland, particularly Jakobshavn.”

“This study does not mean we are out of the water.”

“If these deep glaciers are this sensitive to the water, then we could be looking at faster sea level rise out of Greenland than we thought,” added Willis, an oceanographer. 

Other Greenland experts agree that Jakobshavn’s recent stagnation is not optimistic news.

“This study does not mean we are out of the water,” said Luke Trusel, a geologist at Rowan University who had no role in the study. “In fact, I’d say it says the opposite by demonstrating just how sensitive this major glacier is to changes in the ocean.” Trusel recently visited and published research on Greenland’s accelerating melt.

Jakobshavn is a big actor in the planet’s future and Greenland’s stability — a land that holds enough ice to raise sea levels by 23 feet. That’s because Jakobshavn isn’t a normal glacier. 

The abysmal ice river fills a canyon that penetrates deep into the heart of Greenland. Today, Jakobshavn acts like a plug or cork keeping much of Greenland’s colossal ice masses at bay and locked into the landmass. But as scientists found, the ocean may progressively dissolve Jakobshavn’s cliff-like face and start unleashing this ice in the coming decades.

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“When I say it’s like the cork on a champagne bottle, this really is a channel that potentially could tap the ice on the rest of the ice sheet,” said NASA’s Willis. 

Understanding how quickly glaciers like Jakobshavn will melt as Earth continues its accelerated warming trend is the trillion dollar question, noted Willis. The same can be said of glaciers in Antarctica. So top research agencies like NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and a number of university and research institutes around the world have undertaken missions to these remote polar worlds, often flying planes over the hard-to-reach lands.

Willis and his team determined Jakobshavn had slowed by combining radar from airborne expeditions with satellite images of the great ice river. They found that over the last couple years, temperatures in Disko Bay, which sloshes against the great glacier, dropped by 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).

But while detailed projections of Greenland’s melting are under heavy investigation, the greater picture in Greenland — continued, accelerated melting — is already clear. 

“This tipping point has started and there’s no going back,” said Michael Bevis, a professor of geodynamics at Ohio State University who had no role in the study.

Greenland’s glaciers have reached a point of no return, he emphasized, because the colossal ice sheets are getting hit from both above (the air) and below (the oceans). While the sea has dislodged massive of chunk’s of ice from Jakobshavn’s cliff-like face, warmer air melts the ice atop Greenland, creating increasingly vigorous blue rivers that pour into the ocean. After a half-century of steady glacial runoff, things changed dramatically in 2003, said Bevis.

“This tipping point has started and there’s no going back.”

“The amount of melting in the summertime just took off,” said Bevis, who recently published Greenland research of his own. 

What’s more, he emphasized, Greenland’s melting will become all the more exacerbated when widespread, decades-long temperature shifts in the Atlantic Ocean, called the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation, or AMO, bring back warmer waters to the region in the coming decades. This well-understood shift in the AMO, combined with the ocean’s continued absorption of Earth’s accumulating heat, will bring a “double whammy” of melt to Greenland, Bevis said.   

Overall, though, it’s important to remember that Greenland’s melting — and that of its major glaciers — will have some ups and downs within the greater accelerating melting trend. 

“Think of this variability as dips and crests in a road that is taking you up a mountain,” explained Trusel.  “It would be incorrect to think that because you are going down a slight dip in this upward path that you are no longer climbing the mountain.”

“The longer term trends cannot be ignored here,” emphasized Trusel. “As emissions of greenhouse gases continue, the atmosphere and ocean will warm.”

But this latest research means that the warming oceans — which wash right onto and beneath the Jakobshavn and other Greenland glaciers — will likely have an outsized role in adding to the planet’s overall sea level rise. Our best current estimates for the globe’s total sea level rise by century’s end show the ocean is on track to rise by over two feet by 2100. But it could be as much as six feet.

“The short answer is we’ll have to revise the projections upward,” said Willis, referencing the current projection of over two feet of sea level rise. 

While the planet’s carbon emissions continue to rise — and may not even peak for over a decade — Jakobshavn will continue to shed great masses of ice, even if that melting has temporarily slowed.

“Imagine an iceberg spanning the length of several New York city blocks,” said Trusel, who witnessed Jakobshavn’s icebergs floating out to sea. “They’re awe-inspiring and illuminate the magnitude of changes happening to the Greenland ice sheet.”

It will come as no surprise to anyone, but I was not cool in high school. Not even a little bit. 

Now that I’m a 30-year-old human masquerading as a grownup, I had hoped I’d put my desires to be part of the cool crowd to bed long ago. But years after this angst-ridden festival of self-consciousness, I have become uncomfortably reacquainted with the feeling of being on the outside of the clique. 

Over a decade since I put high school well and truly behind me, I now inhabit a virtual one. And I’d be lying if I said that I don’t feel a pang of those teenage feelings — of thinking I’m on the outskirts of Cool Town — anytime I scroll through my Twitter feed. 

I’m talking about Twitter cliques — those sub-communities of people who often have large followings, who pile into each other’s mentions, and who seem to have a niche sense of humour that’s unique to their own clique sub-culture. To outsiders, they can feel like kingmakers, Somebodies, powerful industry peers, or even just people you want to be friends with. 

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Motherhood blogger Emily Beatrice says she’s found the realm of mummy blogging to be full of Twitter cliques. “I would reach out to other writers and be ignored,” Beatrice says. “It’s very much like high school; everyone trying to get to the top, by either stepping on others or sucking up to those they deem more powerful.” Feeling excluded from these groups made Beatrice feel “insignificant and not good enough — as though I would have to change who I am to fit in with them.” 

Beatrice decided to start the #OtherMothers community for mothers who also might have felt excluded in the same way. “#OtherMothers is about women supporting women regardless of differences in opinion, class, race, or religion,” she says. “White middle class privilege online limits the view we have of motherhood and women in general.” 

As someone who is, in all honesty, a little bit insecure, Twitter amplifies the existing things going on inside my mind. Like, what if no one laughs at the funny thing I have to say? What if people find me really annoying? What if people witness my joke not landing and judge me? Róisín Lanigan, junior editor at iD magazine, shares some of this sentiment. 

“I literally always feel this way with groups of writers who seem to all be super talented mates. I’m always like, afraid to follow or engage with them a lot in case they’re like, ‘Who is this loser?,’” says Lanigan. People on Twitter thinking “Who is this loser?” is a worry that has crossed my mind on more than one occasion, too.

According to psychology academics, clique formation is actually not unique to our high school experiences — the existences of Twitter cliques boils down to our human nature. Dr Michael Muthukrishna — assistant professor of economic psychology at London School of Economics — says this “tendency to form in-groups and out-groups” is a core part of human nature. Not only that: this part of us long outlasts our teenage years. Robin Dunbar — professor of evolutionary psychology at University of Oxford — tells me that clique formation is “a natural pattern” for us which “remains a feature of our social world throughout life.”

“According to our research, we typically make friends with people who are most like us (those who share our opinions and interests),” says Dunbar. In his research, Dunbar has identified that followers of a Twitter account “exhibit exactly the same pattern of groupings in their online conversations with each other as in the face-to-face world.” This means there are strong parallels in the way humans interact with their IRL friends and their Twitter pals. “They have the same layered structure with the same numbers — an inner-inner clique of 1-2 [users], an inner clique of about 5, a less intense clique of about 15, and so on — with the same contact frequencies,” Dunbar explains.

One thing that we all know from our own experiences of being in friendship groups in real-life — be it in high school, the workplace, or elsewhere — is that we usually tend to feel loyal to that group. LSE professor Muthukrishna uses the example of “arbitrarily chosen high school sports teams” and the “willingness to compete for your side at the expense of the other.” 

Researchers have studied this “willingness to form groups, favour in-groups, and discriminate against out-groups” using something called the Minimal Group Paradigm — a method used in a laboratory to artificially create social groups. “This [tendency] falls under something called social identity theory or ethnic psychology (where ethnic just refers to small groups that have a mini culture unto themselves),” Muthukrishna says. 

So, why exactly are we so loyal to our friendship cliques? Well, the answer is complicated. 

“The simplest way to put it is that we are an unusually cooperative species — our closest cousins, chimps, don’t cooperate anywhere near as much as we do,” says Muthukrishna. “In reality the greatest successes and the worst atrocities are the product of individuals co-operating in groups to some end.”

“The greatest successes and the worst atrocities are the product of individuals cooperating in groups to some end.”

Clique forming — whether IRL or on Twitter — is a fundamental part of our human nature and, therefore, something that is unlikely to change. At the very same time, it’s important to acknowledge how exclusionary and alienating our online behaviour can be to other people — and the ways we can work to change it.

Just as parenting blogger Beatrice turned her negative experience of cliquedom into a way to find and build a more welcoming community, there are stories that show another, more positive side of Twitter’s community spirit. It’s important to note that while Twitter is full of groups that feel impenetrable and highly exclusive, it can also be a place where people find positive, supportive, and mobilising communities that rally together to affect social change. 

Black Twitter is one such community. Feminista Jones characterises #BlackTwitter as “a collective of active, primarily African-American Twitter users who have created a virtual community” and used their collective force to bring about “a wide range of sociopolitical changes.” This community has since been praised for its role in “focusing the nation’s attention” on the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. 

Twitter has the ability to unite for good, but, as many of us are painfully aware, it also has the capacity to divide for bad. Though we’re hiding behind computer screens and phones, we’re human beings, and our human traits are mirrored and amplified through social media. Being cognisant of that will undoubtedly serve all of us well. 

With the 2020 presidential race already heating up for Democrats, one of the most perplexing questions has been how to pronounce the name of South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg.

Butt-i-gig? Beyoo-tee-geeg? It’s a tricky one but thankfully there’s now a helpful guide to getting it right and it’s in song form.

The ditty is courtesy of Aaron Nemo, a writer at The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, where Buttigieg has actually already made an appearance. It’s nice to see things come full circle.

A longshot when he entered the race, Buttigieg has since generated a lot of buzz with profiles from the Washington Post, CNN, NBC, and plenty of other places. Not that an early buzz is an indication of a future nomination; just ask Ben Carson.

But it’s hard to deny the fascination around the young mayor with a funny name and a Twitter celeb husband, especially in such a crowded field of Democratic heavyweights.

So watch the video on repeat to learn how to pronounce Buttigieg because the first debates are just a few months away.