West Virginia
The amount of Greenland ice that melted last weekend could cover West Virginia in a foot of water
The quantity of ice that melted in Greenland between July 15 and 17 alone — 6 billion tons of water per day — could be sufficient to fill 7.2 million Olympic-sized swimming swimming pools, in accordance with information from the US Nationwide Snow and Ice Knowledge Middle.
Put one other means, it was sufficient to cowl the complete state of West Virginia with a foot of water.
“The northern soften this previous week just isn’t regular, 30 to 40 years of local weather averages,” mentioned Ted Scambos, a senior analysis scientist on the Nationwide Snow and Ice Knowledge Middle on the College of Colorado. “However melting has been on the rise, and this occasion was a spike in soften.”
For the scientists out on the ice sheet, the heat has been alarming.
“It undoubtedly worries me,” mentioned Kutalmis Saylam, a analysis scientist with the College of Texas who’s at present stationed in Greenland. “Yesterday we may wander round in our t-shirts — that was probably not anticipated.”
The newest analysis factors to a increasingly more precarious state of affairs on the Northern Hemisphere’s most icy island.
On the East Greenland Ice-core Challenge — or EastGRIP — analysis camp in northwest Greenland, the work of scientists to know the impression of local weather change is being thwarted by local weather change itself.
Aslak Grinsted, a local weather scientist on the College of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute, advised CNN that they’ve been attempting to get flights into the camp to allow them to ship out the ice cores they’ve not too long ago collected. However the heat is destabilizing the touchdown website.
“The temperatures we’re seeing proper now are just too sizzling for the ski-equipped planes to land,” Grinsted mentioned. “So we retailer the ice cores in massive synthetic caves we now have made into the snow to guard it from the warmth of the summer time.”
Scientists make the most of the irregular heat whereas they wait, taking part in volleyball of their shorts on an ice sheet on the prime of the world.
Earlier than human-caused local weather change kicked in, temperatures close to 32 levels Fahrenheit there have been unprecedented. However because the Nineteen Eighties, this area has warmed by round 1.5 levels Fahrenheit per decade — 4 occasions sooner than the worldwide tempo — making it all of the extra doubtless that temperatures will cross the melting threshold.
Grinsted referred the temperatures on the EastGRIP analysis website as a “warmth wave,” and famous that world warming is pushing the mercury larger extra typically.
“Sure, the possibility of temperatures getting this sizzling is clearly linked to world warming,” Grinsted mentioned.