HomelandGreenland saw temperatures as high as 60 degrees Fahrenheit (15.5 degrees Celsius) last weekend.
Experts say it’s enough to submerge West Virginia under a foot of water.
Scientists at the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) told CNN that the “major melt” was caused by temperatures 10 degrees above normal from July 15-17. 80% of Greenland is covered by ice. If this ice melts completely, the amount of water mixed with the ocean will raise sea level by 22 feet.
Scientists at Ohio State University warned in 2020: “This is enough to double the frequency of storm surge flooding in many of the world’s major coastal cities” by the end of the century.
Ted Scambos, a senior research scientist at the University of Colorado’s National Snow and Snow Data Center, told CNN late last week that Greenland did not have the highest temperatures seen in the 30- to 40-year climate record.
The Arctic is warming rapidly due to climate change. The latest data from April shows that the region will warm four times faster than the rest of the world.
Some experts fear that summer sea ice will disappear completely by 2035.
University of Texas scientist Gottalmis Xylem, who is currently conducting research in Greenland, said the “heat wave” was worrying as he and his team went out wearing T-shirts over the weekend. The Greenland Ice Sheet is the second largest freshwater ice sheet on the planet, covering about 695,000 square miles, second only to Antarctica.
The melting process of the ice sheets, which started in 1990, has accelerated since 2000.
On July 27, 2021, Columbia University climate scientist Marco Tedesco 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 from the Center for Polar and Oceanographic Research found that the ice sheet has lost a total of 532 gigatons of weight, which is 15 percent more than the previous record – 2012.
In February 2022, scientists from the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge found that the ice sheet was melting from the bottom up, and this was thought to be the biggest contributor to global sea level rise.
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