Temperatures peaked at around 15.5°C in Greenland last weekend, a level way above the region's July average of 11°C, causing massive amounts of land ice to melt, spilling over six billion tons of water into the sea.
This is enough to flood the entire province of Gauteng with just under a metre of water.
This “spike melt,” experienced from July 15 to 17, was due to temperatures being just 4 °C warmer than normal, scientists at the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) told CNN.
Around four-fifths of Greenland, the 12th largest country in the world, is covered by an ice sheet. Scientists have calculated that if this ice had to melt completely, global sea levels would rise by 6.6 metres.
Scientists from Ohio State University warned in 2020 that “this is enough to double the frequency of coastal storm surges in many of the world's largest coastal cities" by the end of the century.
Ted Scambos, a senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Centre at the University of Colorado, told CNN that this past weekend’s high temperatures had not been seen in the 40 years of climate records in Greenland.
The Arctic region has seen rapid warming due to climate change over the last few decades, with recent data showing that it could be warming up to four times as fast as any other area in the world. Some experts fear that summer sea ice could completely disappear by 2035.
Kutalmis Saylam, a scientist at the University of Texas who is currently conducting research in Greenland, told CNN that the ‘heatwave’ is worrisome because over the weekend she and her team were outside in T-shirts.
Greenland boasts the second largest ice sheet in the world, covering an area of 1.8 million km2, second only to Antarctica. The melting of the ice sheets started in 1990 and has accelerated since 2000.
On 27 July 2021, Marco Tedesco, a climate scientist at Columbia University reported that Greenland’s ice sheet lost 8.5 billion tons of surface mass in a single day.
But it was 2019 that shattered all the melting records so far. Researchers with the Centre for Polar and Marine Research found the ice sheet lost 532 gigatons of mass overall, which is 15% higher than the previous record holder, 2012.
In February this year, scientists from Cambridge's Scott Polar Research Institute found the ice sheet is melting from the bottom up and deemed it the largest single contributor to global sea level rise.
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