View of Jakobshavn glacier in Greenland from a NASA research aircraft. (Photo: NASA / JPL)

While scientists continue to warn about melting glaciers in the Antarctic, one of Greenland's major glaciers is developing again, NASA said.

The Jakobshavn Glacier, the fastest glacier in the last 20 years, has been growing thicker and slower, researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said.

Although the glacier continues to lose more ice to the warmer waters of the ocean than to the accumulation of snow, the researchers note that Jakobshavn showed signs that it was progressing and not did not back down.

"At first we did not believe it," said in a statement Ala Khazendar, lead author of the study, who works at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "We thought pretty much that Jakobshavn would continue as if nothing had happened in the last 20 years."

The study was published on Monday in the Nature Geoscience peer-reviewed journal.

It has been found that growth is caused by a climatic pattern that shifts the North Atlantic Ocean between colder waters and warmer waters every five to twenty years. The researchers found that the waters near the glacier were colder than they have been since the 1980s.

The study is based on data from NASA's Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) mission, launched in 2016 to learn how ocean waters affect Greenland glaciers.

Josh Willis, principal investigator of the OMG mission, said that this cooling scheme only constitutes a "temporary break" for the glacier and that it should probably back down once the climate pattern will reheat the waters. "In the long run, the oceans are warming up, and seeing the oceans have a huge impact on the glaciers is bad news for the Greenland icecap."

Earlier this year, researchers warned that Greenland was on the verge of turning into ice melt. In January, a study published in a peer-reviewed journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that ice was melting in Greenland four times faster than it was 16 years ago.

More: One of the largest glaciers in Antarctica has a giant hole. What would happen if it collapsed?

More: The glaciers of Mount Everest are melting. And that is to expose the bodies of dead mountaineers

Follow Brett Molina on Twitter: @ brettmolina23.

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