Recent unseasonably warm temperatures, brought to Greenland by a heat wave that smashed records across Europe a week before, have accelerated the melting of the ice sheet that covers 82 percent of the country, releasing water at record rates. On Thursday alone, an estimated 12.5 billion tons of meltwater flowed into the ocean, which would be the highest single-day total since 1950, according to Ted Scambos, a senior researcher at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, quoted in The Washington Post. Snow and ice melt every summer in Greenland, and this heat wave was an anomalous event, but climatologists warn that overall warming trends intensify such events, and make them more likely in years to come. The Associated Press cites a June 2019 study that concluded “melting ice in Greenland alone will add between 5 and 33 centimeters (2 to 13 inches) to rising global sea levels by the year 2100.”
A Heatwave in Greenland
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Read moreA large river of melting water flows on an ice sheet in western Greenland on August 1, 2019. #
Caspar Haarløv, Into the Ice via AP -
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Read moreA boat carrying tourists motors past an iceberg at the mouth of the Ilulissat Icefjord during unseasonably warm weather on July 30, 2019, near Ilulissat, Greenland. #
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Read moreA massive iceberg peeks out from behind fog in the Ilulissat Icefjord on August 3, 2019. #
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Read moreBraided meltwater rivers form on an ice sheet in western Greenland on August 1, 2019. #
Caspar Haarløv, Into the Ice via AP -
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Read moreMeltwater in western Greenland drains into a moulin hole that empties into the ocean underneath the ice, photographed on August 1, 2019. #
Caspar Haarløv, Into the Ice via AP -
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Read moreMeltwater flows into the fjord near Kangerlussaq in western Greenland on August 1, 2019. #
Caspar Haarløv, Into the Ice via AP -
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Read moreFlowers bloom on a hillside along the Ilulissat Icefjord during unseasonably warm weather on July 30, 2019. #
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Read moreVisitors look out onto free-floating ice jammed into the Ilulissat Icefjord on July 30, 2019. #
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Read moreIn this aerial view, ice that has broken off from Greenland's Eqip Sermia glacier drifts away from the glacier's 200-meter-tall face during unseasonably warm weather on August 2, 2019. Eqip Sermia is approximately 350 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle, and while the calving of ice from its face is a natural process going back millions of years, the glacier's retreat of about three kilometers over the past 100 years is a new phenomenon. #
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Read moreThis natural-color image made with the Operational Land Imager on the Landsat 8 satellite shows meltwater ponding on the surface of the ice sheet in northwestern Greenland, near the sheet’s edge, on July 30, 2019. While the heat wave broke in western Europe after a few days late last month, the extreme temperatures shifted north and caused massive ice melts in Greenland and the Arctic, according to Ruth Mottram, a climate scientist with the Danish Meteorological Institute. #
NASA via AP -
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Read moreA massive iceberg stands at the mouth of the Ilulissat Icefjord during a week of unseasonably warm weather on August 3, 2019. #
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Read moreIn this aerial view, melting ice forms a lake on free-floating ice jammed into the Ilulissat Icefjord on July 30, 2019. #
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Read moreInuit fishermen prepare a net as free-floating ice floats behind them at the mouth of the Ilulissat Icefjord on July 30, 2019. #
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Read moreIn this view from an airplane, rivers of meltwater carve into the Greenland ice sheet near the Sermeq Avangnardleq glacier on August 4, 2019, near Ilulissat. #
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Read moreMeltwater rushes down from the Greenland ice sheet near the Sermeq Avangnardleq glacier on August 4, 2019. #
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Read moreWater drips from ice in the Ilulissat Icefjord during unseasonably warm weather on July 30, 2019. #
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