Greenland experiences ice melt that could cover Florida in 2 inches of water
As human-caused climate change warms the planet, ice loss has increased rapidly
Greenland is experiencing its most significant melting event of the year as temperatures in the Arctic surge. The amount of ice that melted on Tuesday alone would be enough to cover the entire state of Florida in two inches of water.
It's the third instance of extreme melting in the past decade, during which time the melting has stretched farther inland than the entire satellite era, which began in the 1970s, reports the CNN.
Greenland lost more than 8.5 billion tons of surface mass on Tuesday, and 18.4 billion tons since Sunday, according to the Denmark Meteorological Institute. While this week's total ice loss is not as extreme as a similar event in 2019 — a record melt year — the area of the ice sheet that's melting is larger.
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"It's a significant melt," said Ted Scambos, a senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado.
"July 27th saw most of the eastern half of Greenland from the northern tip all the way to the southern tip mostly melted, which is unusual."
As human-caused climate change warms the planet, ice loss has increased rapidly.
According to a recent study published in the journal Cryosphere, Earth has lost a staggering 28 trillion tonnes of ice since the mid-1990s, a large portion of which was from the Arctic, including the Greenland ice sheet.
"In the past decade, we've already seen that surface melting in Greenland has become both more severe and more erratic," said Thomas Slater, a glaciologist at the University of Leeds and a co-author on that report.
"As the atmosphere continues to warm over Greenland, events such as yesterday's extreme melting will become more frequent."
