Greenland Suffers A Last Minute Meltdown

After a first half of summer that didn't bring much melting
to the Greenland ice sheet, relatively speaking, a heat
wave last week caused a massive melting spurt. A melting
Greenland is not good, as it contributes to sea level rise. 

This summer had been shaping up as one in which the dreaded annual ice sheet melt in Greenland seemed like it wouldn't be quite as bad as in recent years.  

But the last week of July brought a heat wave and big melt to the Greenland ice sheets. 

Melting there is never good.  Thawing ice in the Arctic Ocean is also not a good thing, but at least that won't raise global sea levels.  That ice is like the ice cubes in your gin and tonic. If the ice melts, the level of liquid in your glass doesn't rise.

Greenland is different. The ice is all on land, above sea level. When it melts, it pours into the oceans and stays there. Unless Greenland gets colder again and snow and ice accumulate year after year. That ain't going to happen with climate change. 

Virtually every summer Greenland will lose of its ice mass. Each year, you want to hope the melting doesn't amount to much.  That way you can hope the winter brings decent additions to the snow and ice mass up there to blunt the impacts of the melting.

With climate change, though, it's a losing battle. A greater and greater proportion of ice melts now each summer than is replenished in the winter.  The excess water runs off into the oceans, worsening global sea level rises. 

Which increases the risk of flooding in coastal cities. It's not as if you can pick up an entire city and move it inland, uphill, in just a few years. Or decades. 

This summer wasn't too bad up there, at least at the start. There was melting ice, but not to the extremes we saw in recent years. 

Then last week. When that heat wave hit.  Enough melt water came off of Greenland to cover all of Florida with two inches of water, reports phys.org news. 

This wasn't the biggest meltdown Greenland has had, that one was in 2019.  But the one last week covered a larger area than the one two years ago. 

Parts of northern Greenland got up as high as 68 degree last week, well above average, says phys.org news 

Nerlerit Inaat airport in northeastern Greenland got up to 74 degrees, an all-time record high for that site.  

This new melt means the ice sheet albedo - the proportion of sunlight reflected of the surface of the ice sheet has worsened. 

The more melting, the dirtier the surface of the ice.  Dirty ice is darker and can absorb more of the sun's energy, increasing its ability to melt.

Fairly luckily, this past week's meltdown happened fairly late in the summer. The sun angle up there is decreasing rapidly, and the chances of new snow to whiten up the ice, is rising.  This would have been worse had this happened in May or June.

The melt season in Greenland typically ends in early September. 

Still, it's bad.   

Melting of the Greenland ice sheets began in earnest around 1990 and accelerated around the year 2000. Scientist believe the Greenland ice sheet is melting at a fastest rate in at least 12,000 years.