| Summary: | The melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet is accelerating, with glaciers shiftingfrom marine to land termination and potential consequences for fordecosystems downstream. Monthly samples in 2016 in two fords in southwestGreenland show that subglacial discharge from marine-terminating glacierssustains high phytoplankton productivity that is dominated by diatomsand grazed by larger mesozooplankton throughout summer. In contrast,melting of land-terminating glaciers results in a ford ecosystem dominatedby bacteria, picophytoplankton and smaller zooplankton, which has onlyone-third of the annual productivity and half the CO2 uptake compared tothe ford downstream from marine-terminating glaciers.
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