Turquoise , pale Charles Grey , and sky-blue streaks stand out against a dark taupe , earthen screen background ina planet imagefrom the European Union ’s Copernicus Earth observance program . It ’s a hypnotize picture , conjuring more immediate associations with a painting than our planet , but it ’s not a welcome sight for climate scientists . Instead , the raw image illustrates a recent , massive ice melt case in Greenland and the ongoing toll of climate modification .
For a few years before this calendar month in Greenland , it was blistering — really hot , at least for the mostly icy landmass . In part of the commonwealth , temperatures hovered around 60 degrees Fahrenheit ( 15.5 Celsius ) , more than 10 degrees warmer than the norm for July , grant toa reportfrom CNN .
Those unco high temperatures triggered wide - scale snow and frappe melting across Greenland ’s chalk sail . In just three days , from July 15 - 17 , the land mass lost about 18 billion tons of pee . Or , in other term , enough urine to pass over the entire land of West Virginiain a foot of piddle .
Between July 15 and July 17, about 18 billion tons of water melted off of Greenland’s ice sheet and flowed towards the ocean.Photo:European Union, Copernicus Sentinel-2 imagery
Then , the melting intensified even further . Between8 and 10 billion tonsof water per solar day melted and run - off from the internal-combustion engine sheet from July 20 to July 23 , saidTed Scambos , a glaciologist at the University of Colorado , in an e-mail to Gizmodo . The Copernicus planet image was capture at the height of that melt case on July 22 .
All of that meltwater carriedtens of thousandsof days of glacial sediment along with it . The opaque , putty colored patch bleed into the shining blue fiord visible in the satellite image are that sediment ( effectively , frozen mud ) heading toward the Labrador Sea . Godthåbsfjord , labeled in the image , is known as Nuup Kangerlua in Greenlandic and is located on the Southwestern coast of the country . It ’s one of the largest fjord system in the world , and Greenland ’s working capital , Nuuk , is locate at its mouth .
Since last hebdomad , the spindle in Greenland ’s chicken feed thawing has devolve and flush off closer to what is received for this time year . However , turgid melt anomaly remain worrying . In 2021 , it rained at the summit of Greenland ’s ice tabloid forthe first timein recorded history . The same month , the landmass lost enough ice in a individual dayto cover Florida . In 2019 , Greenland lost532 billion tonsof icing — the prominent amount ever recorded in a single year .
As the rural area ’s ice sheet melt , globalsea stage rear , triggering more severe and frequent flooding worldwide . If all of the icing on Greenland were to melt , it would raise sea levels by about 24 feet . But the melting also actuate a feedback loop . As more melting occurs and water kitty on the ice sheet surface or leaves expose rock behind , the landmass becomes less broody . A less reflective Greenland ingest more oestrus andcontributes to Arctic heating . So Greenland ’s melting ice sheet becomes a self - propelling cognitive operation .
The Arctic is already warm more thantwice as fastas the rest of the major planet , and we can not afford extra losses if we want to stave off the worst impact of clime change .
ClimatologyEarthGlaciology
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