GREENLAND EXPERIENCE ‘MASSIVE MELTING EVENT’: REPORTS

  • 01/08/2021

According to Danish government researchers who monitor the ice sheet, the Greenland ice sheet experienced a ‘massive melting event” this week, releasing enough mass “to cover Florida with 2 inches (5 centimetres) of water.’
The melting event on Wednesday was the third-largest single-day loss of ice in Greenland since 1950, according to the researchers, who published the results of their monitoring on the website Polar Portal. The others were in 2012 and 2019.
Even though the 2019 event was larger in terms of volume, researchers claim that Wednesday’s event affected a larger area.
On Wednesday, an estimated 22 gigatons of ice melted from the sheet. According to climate scientist Xavier Fettweis of the University of Liege in Belgium, more than half of that mass (12 gigatons) flowed into the ocean.
Prior heavy snowfall had allowed the remaining 10 gigatons to be absorbed and possibly refrozen, he said. A gigaton is a mass unit that equals one billion metric tonnes (2.2 trillion pounds).
Summer temperatures in northern Greenland are currently exceeding 20 degrees Celsius (68 degrees Fahrenheit), which is twice the summer average, according to the Danish Meteorological Institute. Temperatures in the area touched 23.4 degrees Celsius on Thursday.

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