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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In 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. #
Sean Gallup / Getty -
This 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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