“A roaring glacial melt in Greenland where it’s 22C today and Danish officials say 12 billions tons of ice melted in 24 hours, yesterday”
On July 31st, the highest point on Greenland’s ice sheet experienced melting for only the ninth time in 2000 years. Here are all the years that has happened, including twice in the last decade.
Directly observed:
2019
2012
Seen in ice cores:
1889
1192
1094
992
758
753
244
From IFLScience: Things are only set to get worse in Greenland, too. The problem of melting polar ice creates a nasty positive feedback loop that meddles with the planet’s ability to cool off. Since ice is reflective, it does a good job at bouncing solar radiation back into space. However, with less ice, more of this heat energy is soaked up by the Earth and becomes trapped in the atmosphere.
While seasonal melting of the ice sheet is nothing unusual, these levels are staggeringly high and close to rivaling record levels seen in 2012 when the ice sheet lost about 250 billion tons of ice.
As if all of this wasn’t enough to jar you off your chair, considerable chunks of the Arctic are currently on fire – literally. This year’s baking weather has also seen an “unprecedented” number of fires burning in parts of the planet north of the Arctic Circle, including Greenland, Russia, Canada, and Alaska.