Extreme melt event led to the greatest single-day volume loss from the ice sheet since 1950
By Andrew Freedman and Jason Samenow, Washington Post
When one thinks of Greenland, images of an icebound, harsh and forbidding landscape probably come to mind, not a landscape of ice pocked with melt ponds and streams transformed into raging rivers. And almost certainly not one that features wildfires.
Yet the latter description is exactly what Greenland looked like this week, according to imagery shared on social media, scientists on the ground and data from satellites.
An extraordinary melt event that began earlier this week continued through August 1 on the Greenland ice sheet, and there are signs that about 60 percent of the expansive ice cover saw detectable surface melting, including at higher elevations that only rarely see temperatures climb above freezing.
[Images show staggering extent of melting on Greenland Ice Sheet due to heat wave]
On Thursday, the ice sheet saw its biggest single-day volume loss on record, with 12.5 billion tons of ice lost to the ocean from surface melt, according to computer model estimates based on satellite and other data. Records of daily mass loss date back to 1950.
“This model, which uses weather data and observations to build a record of ice and snowfall, and net change in mass of the ice sheet, is remarkably accurate,” says Ted Scambos, a senior researcher at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Colorado. “I would accept the result as fact. 12.5 billion tons [lost] in one day, and the highest single-day total since 1950,” Scambos said.
July 31 was the biggest surface melt day since at least 2012, with about 60 percent of the ice sheet seeing at least 1 millimeter of melt at the surface, and more than 10 billion tons of ice lost to the ocean from surface melt, according to data from the Polar Portal, a website run by Danish polar research institutions, and the NSIDC.
Melting ice forms a lake on free-floating ice jammed into the Ilulissat Icefjord during unseasonably warm weather on July 30, 2019, near Ilulissat, Greenland. (Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
According to Ruth Mottram, a climate researcher with the Danish Meteorological Institute, the ice sheet sent 197 billion tons of water pouring into the Atlantic Ocean during July.
