Scientists from the University of Iceland recently reported that the country’s glaciers are expanding for the first time in 25 years. Some of Iceland's largest glaciers had been losing ice around one or two meters of ice per year for some time, but thanks to lower temperatures and higher snowfall, this trend is reversing. It is happening in Greenland as well, where the Jakobshavn glacier — previously the fastest melting glacier - is gaining ice again as well. Ocean temperatures have cooled to levels not recorded since the 80's.
To explain why Greenland and Iceland are gaining more ice mass that normal, while carbon dioxide levels have risen, scientists are looking to the sun. The sun has just finished a Modern Maximum cycle (a 30 year period of high solar activity) and is now in for an extended cooling pattern.
Dr. Valentina Zharkova of Northumbria University predicts that within a year or two, a new Super Grand Solar Minimum will be underway, bringing with it a decades long cold global temperature period. This cycle is comparable to the little ice age that occurred between 1300 and 1850. A pair of dynamo waves on the surface and deep convection layers of the sun are about to become offset from each other by 2022, and will be increasingly out of synch between 2030 and 2040. This phenomenon is thought to be largely responsible for the coming weak solar cycle.
