The heatwave being experienced in the Northern Hemisphere is also impacting the Arctic regions, especially Greenland.
Temperatures have been running around 60 degrees Fahrenheit — 10 degrees warmer than normal for this time of year, scientists told CNN News. This has triggered rapid melting made visible by the rivers of meltwater rushing into the ocean.
“It definitely worries me,” University of Texas research scientist Kutalmis Saylam says. “Yesterday we could wander around in our T-shirts—that was not really expected.”
Greenland’s ice sheet is two miles thick in some spots, and sea levels would rise 24 feet if it all melted, the New York Times previously reported.
The series of warm days has meant 6 gigatons of water (6 billion tons) per day are being released into the ocean. That is enough to fill 7.2 million Olympic-sized swimming pools, according to data from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center.
Put another way, the amount of ice that melted in Greenland between July 15 and 17 was enough to cover the entire state of West Virginia with a foot of water.
Greenland is host to 3 million gigatons worth of water in its ancient ice, which began to form 3 million years ago. So, while losing just 6 gigatons of water may not seem like much, it is part of a trend, and it worries scientists, reports iNews.
“The northern melt this past week is not normal, looking at 30 to 40 years of climate averages,” said Ted Scambos, a senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado. “But melting has been on the increase, and this event was a spike in the melt.”
In a study released last month, researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory warned that the Arctic is heating up more than four times faster than the rate of global warming.
Their analysis also detected two big steps in the overall warming trend, one in 1986 and one in 1999. Scientists are saying now that this year’s Greenland melt could exceed 2019’s record melt of 532 billion tons of ice.
