The Washington Post reports:
An extraordinary melt event that began earlier this week continues on Thursday on the Greenland ice sheet, and there are signs that about 60 percent of the expansive ice cover has seen detectable surface melting, including at higher elevations that only rarely see temperatures climb above freezing.
July 31 was the biggest melt day since at least 2012, with about 60 percent of the ice sheet seeing at least 1 millimeter of melt at the surface, and more than 10 billion tons of ice lost to the ocean from surface melt, according to data from the Polar Portal, a website run by Danish polar research institutions, and the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
According to Ruth Mottram, a climate researcher with the Danish Meteorological Institute, the ice sheet sent 197 billion tons of water pouring into the Atlantic Ocean during July.
Greenland is melting away before our eyes https://t.co/aR4jFiM5zH pic.twitter.com/3cALP3H6Sb
— Rolling Stone (@RollingStone) July 31, 2019
Update: Here’s what Greenland looks like today — the heat wave there is peaking this afternoon and billions of tons of meltwater is cascading off the ice sheet and irreversibly into the ocean, with consequences for us all.
We are in a climate emergency. pic.twitter.com/IVFSci9E9p
— Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) July 30, 2019
Greenland is melting. Today is expected to be the single biggest melt in recorded history, as 12 billion tons of water dump into the ocean – causing irreparable rise in sea levels.
The next President has to lead on climate as no president has before.pic.twitter.com/pS1SuYXcNX
— Nick Knudsen ?? (@DemWrite) August 1, 2019
Scientists have said that the melt levels are what they originally predicted for the middle or end of the century. https://t.co/TILuq9Ltc8
— William Booth (@BoothWilliam) July 31, 2019
An iceberg floats in Disko Bay in Greenland yesterday, during unseasonably warm weather. The Saharan heat that recently sent temperatures to record levels in Europe is arriving in Greenland now, where summers have become longer and the rate of ice-melt has accelerated. pic.twitter.com/4ahkMKNAdC
— BBC Weather (@bbcweather) July 31, 2019