Greenland aquifer properties measured for the first time

A dozen meters beneath the surface of the southeastern Greenland Ice Sheet is an aquifer that holds roughly as much water as Israel's Dead Sea. The unconfined aquifer occupies about 980 cubic kilometers of Greenland's porous firn, snow that is more than a year old but has not yet compacted to ice. Were the aquifer to drain into the ocean, the water could cause as much as 0.4 millimeter of global sea level rise. Koenig et al . build on their 2011 discovery of the aquifer and report the first attempts to directly measure its properties.