‘Massive melting event’ strikes Greenland
Since 27 July, roughly 8.5 billion tonnes of ice has been lost per day from the surface of the enormous ice sheet – twice its normal average rate of loss during summer. The huge loss comes after temperatures in north Greenland soared to above 20 degrees Celsius, which is double the summer average.
High temperatures on 28 July caused the third-largest single-day loss of ice in Greenland since 1950 – the second and first-biggest single-day losses occurred in 2012 and 2019. Greenland’s yearly ice loss began in 1990. In recent years it has accelerated to roughly four times the levels before 2000.
Even though the amount of ice that melted in this summer’s event was less than two years ago, in some ways it could be worse. “While not as extreme as in 2019 in terms of gigatonnes, the area over which melting takes place is a bit larger than two years ago,” researchers wrote. Global sea levels would rise by about six metres if all of Greenland’s ice melted.
Xavier Fettweis, a climate scientist at the University of Liège, Belgium, estimated that around 22 billion tonnes of ice melted from Greenland’s ice sheet on 28 July, with 12 billion tonnes making its way into the ocean. He tweeted that the other 10 billion tonnes of melted ice was reabsorbed “by the snowpack thanks to the recent heavy snowfall”.
Fettweis attributes the cause of the acceleration in the day’s melting to an atmospheric event, an anticyclone, above the continent. Anticyclones are regions of high pressure which enable the air contained within them to sink, warming as it does so in the summer and creating conditions where hot weather can persist in one area for a long time.
Greenland’s melting season typically runs from June to early September. This year’s melting season has already seen more than 100 billion tonnes of ice melt into the ocean. Greenland’s ice sheet is the only permanent ice sheet on Earth besides the one in Antarctica and has an area of roughly 650,000 square miles.
Did you know? Greenland has about 56,000 inhabitants