Greenland Atmospheric River Temporarily Slowed The Island's Inexorable Ice Cap Meltdown

A massive atmospheric river hit Greenland in March, 2022
and dumped so much snow that it temporarily  halted
the dangerous melting of its massive ice cap. 

As land-based glaciers melt and wilt under pressure from climate change, sea levels keep rising as a result . Long term, it's easily one of the biggest threats to us humans as the world warms. 

That's one of the reasons why climate scientists are obsessed with Greenland. There's a lot of ice up there, and the more it melts, the more the sea levels rise. 

 If all of Greenland's ice mass melts, which I admit won't happen anytime soon, global sea levels would rise by an average of 23 feet. 

Which would be absolutely devastating. Even a couple feet of rising seas would be a zillion dollar, life threatening, world-changing  mess. So you see why Greenland is important.

It's mostly bad news as big bits and pieces of Greenland's ice melts every year in the stew of a climate change summer  Because they are human, scientists do look for, ore at least vaguely celebrate, any piece of good news. 

They found one of those happy pieces of news in a massive atmospheric river that hit Greenland in 2022. 

I've told you about atmospheric rivers in past posts.  Those are those ribbons of high moisture air that come off oceans, hit land and dump often incredible amounts of rain or snow over a relatively narrow area.

In one sense, they're good, as they supply a lot of the needed moisture that the West Coast of the U.S. and other place need. But they're very often bad, causing intense flooding. 

The atmospheric river that scientist seized upon from 2022 turned out to be a good thing. 

Per Gizmodo:

"A research pair has investigated the recent impact of an intense atmospheric river - a channel of water vapor that brings moisture and heat from warmer oceans to colder regions - on Greenland's ice sheet. 

Unexpectedly, they found that this phenomenon deposit 16 billion tons of snow on Greenland, thought to temporarily slow its ice melt. As detailed in a study published March 3 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, atmospheric rivers might have a more positive impact than researchers had theorized.."

A positive impact, sure. But certainly not a cure-all.

The uber-snowy atmospheric rive that struck Greenland in March, 2022 slowed the island's yearly ice melt but didn't stop it. 

The Greenland ice sheet ultimately shrunk in 2022, just as it did for the previous 26 years and just as it did for the subsequent two.

But at least for now, atmospheric rivers might not always be the ice destruction events in Greenland scientists feared.  

The March, 2022 event suggests that Greenlandic atmospheric rivers could be snowy. Very, very snow. That buys just a bit of time in the Greenland ice melt derby. After all, the amount of snow that hit Greenland in that 2022 event boggles the mind. 

THE STORM

That same atmospheric river pummeled Svalbard, an island in the Arctic north of Norway with intense , highly unseasonable rain. 

Researchers who took samples and ice core readings after that epic atmospheric river found some surprising results in Greenland, as Gizmodo tells us:

"The ice core section revealed that the atmospheric river had brought 16 billion tons of snow to Greenland, single-handedly offsetting the ice sheet's yearly loss by 8 percent in just three days." An additional 4.5 billon tons of snow fell over the next few days as the atmospheric river slowly waned. 

Spring, 2022 in Greenland was otherwise unusually warm, so the atmospheric river prevented a LOT of potential ice melt. 

There's no guarantee, of course, that atmospheric rivers will bring welcome snow blitzes to Greenland. As the world continued to warm, a future March 22 mega snow could end up being a mega-rain.

Inches and inches and feet of rain on the Greenland ice cap would really set off a wave of melting that would dwarf any of the big melts we've seen up there in recent summers.  

More Bad Climate News: Frigid Top Of Greenland Isn't So Frigid Anymore

There's still an incredible amount of
ice in Greenland, but unfortunately.
recent studies suggest it is 
melting faster than first thought. 

 The top of Greenland's massive ice sheet is something like two miles above sea level. Given how high that is, and how far north it is, it's a frigid place. Thaws are rare, even in the summer. 

But even there, the climate change news is bad, as it seems to be everywhere. It's hotter up at the tippy top of Greenland than it's been in at least 1,000 years.  

Yes, yes, I know nobody was around to take the temperature of the Greenland ice cap 1,000 years ago, but scientists can still figure out how cold it was centuries ago.

As the Washington Post reports, that warmest in at least 1,000 years conclusion was reached by scientists  who looked at oxygen bubbles in ice taken from deep inside the ice sheet. '

The Washington Post tells us: 

"The samples allowed the researchers to construct a new temperature record based on the oxygen bubbler stored inside them, which reflect the temperature at a the time when the ice was originally laid down. '

'We find the 2001-2011 decade the warmest of the whole period o 1,000 years,' said Maria Horhold, the study's lead author and scientists at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany."

Warming has continued to ramp up since 2011, so the study's findings are probably underestimating how much the climate in Greenland has changed, the Washington Post reports. 

As I've said several times in this blog thingy, what goes on in Greenland doesn't stay in Greenland. Obviously, when any ice up there melts, it eventually flows into the Atlantic Ocean. This contributes to global sea level rises. 

If all of Greenland's ice melts, worldwide sea levels would rise by 20 feet. Obviously, the entire Greenland ice cap won't completely melt anytime soon. But any sea level rise, is bad, considering that melting glaciers around the world, and never mind all that ice thawing in Antarctica is feeding into the oceans, too. 

The warming at that high altitude top of the Greenland ice cap will eventually introduce a nasty feedback loop. 

Part of the reason why the ice cap over millennia has maintained itself is it's so high up. The higher you go, the colder the atmosphere is. That's why you have snow capped mountains in the summer if said mountains are high enough. 

But as the top of Greenland's ice cap melts, its surface will inevitably be at lower and lower elevations. So you end up combining increased temperatures from global warming with higher temperature for simply being at a lower altitude. The rate of melting would then increase for two reasons, not just one.

Climate denialists will note that at some point this winter, it was 65 degrees below zero at a station in Greenland. Yes, that's damn cold. But something called "winter" is going on. Greenland is a frigid place, and climate change has not altered that. 

All the warming we're talking about occurs in the summer. It's chilly in Greenland at the height of July, too, as we already explained. But those thaws are getting more and more disconcerting.