CountryGreenland saw temperatures as high as 60 degrees Fahrenheit (15.5 degrees Celsius) last weekend, melting a massive amount of ice.
Experts say it was enough to submerge West Virginia under a foot of water.
Scientists from the US National Snow and Snow Data Center (NSIDC) told CNN that this “major melt”, from July 15-17, was due to temperatures 10 degrees higher than normal. About 80% of Greenland is covered by a layer of ice. If this ice melted completely, the amount of water released into the ocean would raise sea levels by 22 feet.
Scientists from Ohio State University warned in 2020: this “is sufficient to double the frequency of storm surge floods in many of the world’s largest coastal cities” by the end of the century.
Ted Scampos, a senior research scientist at the University of Colorado’s National Snow and Snow Data Center, told CNN that the high temperatures last weekend were not something seen in 30 to 40 years of climate-related records in Greenland.
The Arctic is rapidly warming due to climate change. The latest data in April shows this region could warm up four times faster than any other region in the world.
Some experts fear that summer sea ice could disappear completely by 2035.
Kotalmis Saylam, a scientist at the University of Texas who is currently doing research in Greenland, said the “heat wave” was worrisome because she and her team were out wearing T-shirts at the weekend. The Greenland Ice Sheet is the second largest mass of freshwater ice on the planet, with an area of about 695,000 square miles, second only to Antarctica.
The melting of the ice sheets began in 1990 and has accelerated since 2000.
On July 27, 2021, Marco Tedesco, a climate scientist at Columbia University, reported that Greenland’s ice sheet lost 8.5 billion tons of surface mass in one day, enough to cover Florida in two inches of water.
Researchers at the Center for Polar and Marine Research found that the ice sheet lost 532 gigatons of mass overall, which is 15 percent more than the previous record – 2012.
And in February 2022, scientists from the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge found that the ice sheet is melting from bottom to top, and they considered it the largest contributor to sea level rise globally.