New massive melting of ice in Greenland in just a week

Such events can create feedback that stimulates further warming and melting of the island.

With climate change raising Arctic temperatures, Greenland has lost a huge amount of ice. The melted amount on Wednesday last week was enough to cover the US state of Florida with 5 inches (nearly 15 cm) of water, scientists from Brussels said, quoted by Reuters.

It was Greenland’s third-largest ice loss in a single day since 1950. The other two records, also in the last decade, occurred in 2012 and 2019.

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The rapid melting followed an invasion of warm air over the Arctic island due to a change in atmospheric circulation patterns, scientists said, noting that there could be more melted ice.

About 22 gigatons of ice melted on Wednesday alone – 12 gigatons flowed into the ocean and 10 gigatons were absorbed by the snow cover, where it could freeze, said Xavier Fatweis, a climate scientist at the University of Liege in Belgium.

Polar Portal, a group of Danish Arctic research institutions, tweeted it as a “mass melting event”. While this volume is less than the record one-day melting of ice in 2019, this week’s event covers a larger areasaid the group, said Marco Tedesco, a climatologist at Columbia University.

As the snow melts, it exposes darker ice or ground below, which absorbs more sunlight instead of reflecting it back from the atmosphere.

“This really positions Greenland to be more vulnerable to the rest of the melting season,” said Tedesco, a research professor at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University.

Scientists have estimated that the melting of Greenland’s ice sheet, the second largest on Earth after Antarctica, has caused about 25 percent of the global sea level rise seen in decades.

Tedesco and other scientists have warned that the models used to project future ice losses do not capture the impact of changing atmospheric circulation patterns – meaning they may underestimate the future melting of Greenland, which lies between the Arctic and Atlantic. ocean.

Meanwhile, the Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the planet due to factors, including the disappearing ice in the Arctic Ocean, which opens up darker water that absorbs solar radiation better than ice.

On Wednesday, air temperatures over Greenland were “alarming”, the EU said, with temperatures in Constable Pynt east of the island reaching 23.2 C.

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