Record heatwave threatens ice sheet
THE hot air that smashed European weather records this week looks set to move towards Greenland and could cause record melting of the world’s second largest ice sheet, the UN said yesterday.
Clare Nullis, spokesperson for the UN World Meteorological Organisation, said the hot air moving up from north Africa had not merely broken European temperature records on Thursday but surpassed them by 2ºc, 3ºc or 4ºc, which she described as “absolutely incredible”.
“According to forecasts, and this is of concern, the atmospheric flow is now going to transport that heat towards Greenland,” she told a regular UN briefing in Geneva.
“This will result in high temperatures and consequently enhanced melting of the Greenland ice sheet,” she said. “We don’t know yet whether it will beat the 2012 level, but it’s close.”
Nullis cited data from Denmark’s Polar Portal, which measures the daily surface mass of the Greenland Ice Sheet. “In July alone, it lost 160 billion tons of ice through surface melting. That’s roughly the equivalent of 64 million Olympic-sized swimming pools. Just in July. Just surface melt – it’s not including ocean melt as well.”
The ice sheet covers 80% of the island and has developed over many thousands of years, with layers of snow compressed into ice. The dome of ice rises to a height of 3km and the total volume of the ice sheet is approximately 2 900 000km3, which would raise global sea levels by 7m if it melted entirely, according to the Polar Portal website.
The warmer air also had implications for Arctic ice extent, which was nearly the lowest on record as of July 15, Nullis said.
Meanwhile in the UK and France travellers faced more chaos during the hot spell. In France, high-speed rail services between Paris, London and Brussels stoped after a power cable failure at the Gare du Nord station in the French capital yesterday, hampering the summer holiday getaway.
Travellers faced a second day of disruption yesterday in Britain after record breaking temperatures gave way to thunderstorms and disturbances left trains in haphazard locations and a fire damaged networks in the north. | Reuters ANA