Melting was intense in the northeastern section of the ice sheet, with 20 to 25 additional melt days than average, and moderately intense in the southwestern section of the ice sheet with 10 to 20 additional melt days (Figure 1). The daily image update is produced from near-real-time operational satellite data, with a data lag of approximately one day. Several recent high-melt years are shown for comparison. Observations around the ice sheet margin (b-d) show new details about how the ice sheet is responding (faster flow in red, slower in blue). Air off the far northern Atlantic Ocean in the Norwegian Sea swept in across the ice sheet. The 10-year average line includes estimates from before 1978 on the left edge of the graph.Credit: X. Fettweis, Université of Liège, Belgium/MARv3.11 regional climate modelHigh-resolution image. Rapid reconfiguration of the Greenland Ice Sheet coastal margin. More information: Jonathan M. Gregory et al, Large and irreversible future decline of the Greenland ice sheet, The Cryosphere (2020).DOI: 10.5194/tc-14-4299-2020 Only a few minor late-season melt events occurred in September and October. The daily image update isn’t current; why? On Thin Ice:Expedition to a Crumbling Ice Shelf. This can be compared to the major melt and ice loss years of 2012, 2019, and others in the last decade with values between 225 and 325 billion tons below average (Figure 5b). Responses include narrowing of fast flow regions, rerouting of ice flow, and abandonment of some glacier outlets. This graph shows surface mass balance (SMB) for Greenland’s 2019 to 2020 autumn-winter-spring season (red line) relative to a 1981 to 2010 reference period. Similar conditions occurred in 2012, the record melt year, when melting … “What we’ve found is that the ice that’s discharging into the ocean is far surpassing the snow that’s accumulating on the surface of the ice sheet.”. We are working to improve the ice sheet mask. In the 20th century, Greenland has lost around 9,000 billion tons of ice in total, accounting for 25 millimeters of sea-level rise. Observations derived from brightness temperatures measured by the Special Sensor Microwave Imager/Sounder (SSMIS) passive microwave radiometer (e.g., Mote 2007; Tedesco et al. © 2019, National Snow and Ice Data Center :: Advancing knowledge of Earth's frozen regions, Daily melt extent mapping is suspended for the winter. The new data collected by ITS_LIVE are allowing researchers to characterize and understand what rapid deglaciation looks like on scales that matter for wildlife, fisheries, infrastructure, and communities. See our, Exchange for Local Observations and Knowledge of the Arctic (ELOKA), NASA Distributed Active Archive Center at NSIDC (NSIDC DAAC), All About Arctic Climatology & Meteorology. PS - When it comes to the impacts of Greenland's melting ice sheet, it is volume, not area, that matters most. Greenland's ice melting faster than at any time in past 12,000 years This article is more than 2 months old. However, visitors may notice that the date on the image is occasionally more than one day behind. This monstrous ice slab stretches 2,480 kilometers (1,540 miles) long and up to 750 kilometers (465 miles) wide. Last week, the world was given two more harsh reminders of what the future holds as residents of Italy’s Aosta valley were told to evacuate, fearing that a huge portion of the Mont Blanc glacier – the equivalent size of Milan cathedral – might collapse. Our interactive chart supports a retrospective look at past Greenland melt seasons. According to the researchers, the ice sheet is seven times the area of the UK, and stores a large amount of the Earth’s frozen water. Read their blog ... Icelights: Answers to your burning questions about ice and climate. The Greenland ice sheet contains about 2.6E+15 (2,600,000,000,000,000) tonnes of water in the form of snow and ice. In the research, the scientists simulated the effects of Greenland ice sheet melting under a range of possible temperature rises, ranging from minimal warming to worst-case scenarios. Daily melt extent mapping is suspended for the winter. A look at weather station data along Greenland’s west coast reflects the regional temperature trends (Figure 4). The 2020 season, which runs from September 1, 2019 to August 31, 2020 in this analysis, shows a net loss smaller than many recent years, but larger than most years in the previous century. The Brooklyn-Battery tunnel in lower Manhattan after Hurricane Sandy and back to normal. To avoid the irreversible sea level rise the melting would cause, scientists say that climate change must be reversed before the Greenland ice sheet has declined to the threshold mass, which would be reached in about 600 years at the highest rate of mass loss within the likely range of the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Home | Contact Us See About the Cryosphere. High pressure was dominant along the northwestern side of Greenland and Baffin Bay for the core of the melt season in Ju… When scientists talk about the cryosphere, they mean the places on Earth where water is in its solid form, frozen into ice or snow. This does not include the imbalance caused by ice flow. Much of the upper elevation areas of the ice sheet saw no melting this year. 2013) indicate that surface melt started early in 2019, around mid-April, 6 to 8 weeks before the long-term average (1981-2010 baseline, Fig. Greenland ice sheet faces irreversible melting, say scientists. Note that the northeast coast (northern Peary Land and Kronprince Christian Land) is showing erroneous melt pixels. Scientists blog from Antarctica and provide a glimpse of what it's like to do research in the field. Credit: National Snow and Ice Data Center High-resolution image. All Rights Reserved, This is a BETA experience. Scott has written about science and technology for 20 years for publications around the world. Calibration of yearly melt detection requires analysis of the springtime snow conditions by a separate program. While thinning ice and retreats from the ice edge change the ice sheet, the shape of the land beneath the ice remains mostly unchanged. It contains enough ice to raise sea levels by 23 feet (7 meters). So IF the Greenland ice sheet were to lose 103 billion tonnes per year into the indefinite future, it would take about twelve thousand five hundred years to lose half of it … The 2020 Greenland Ice Sheet SMB simulated by MARv3.5.2 in real time, Polar Portal’s Greenland surface conditions, Programme for Monitoring of the Greenland Ice Sheet (PROMICE), Jason Box, Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS) in Copenhagen, Denmark, Xavier Fettweis, Université of Liège in Belgium, providing the MARv3.11 model results, Twila Moon, National Snow and Ice Data Center. By Dr. Xavier Fettweis, University of Liège. The GRACE mission concluded science operations in June 2017. This variety of You may opt-out by. A new study warns that Greenland’s ice is melting faster than scientists previously thought. Areas along the coast are masked out because the satellite sensor’s resolution is not fine enough to distinguish ice from land when a pixel overlaps the coast. The Northeast Greenland Ice Stream drains about 15% of the interior ice sheet. The Cryosphere, 14, 1209–1223, doi:10.5194/tc-14-1209-2020. When the remnants of Europe’s second summertime heat wave migrated over Greenland in late July, more than half of the ice sheet’s surface started melting for the first time since 2012. Occasional short-term delays and data outages do occur and are usually resolved in a few days. Cumulative degree days (the sum of the difference between the freezing point, 0 degrees Celsius, and the maximum temperature each day for the spring-summer melt season for two automatic weather stations in Greenland, at Nuuk (NUK_L) and Thule (THU_L). A modest beginning to the Greenland melt season, Greenland Surface Melt Interactive Extent Chart, Polar Portal: Monitoring ice and climate in the Arctic, Sea Ice Index (Passive microwave satellite data), MASIE (Daily sea ice extent, multi-source). Figure 5a. Greenland Ice Sheet Today is produced at the National Snow and Ice Data Center by Ted Scambos, Julienne Stroeve, and Lora Koenig with support from NASA. “We are measuring the pulse of the ice sheet — how much ice glaciers drain at the edges of the ice sheet — which increases in the summer,” King said in the researchers’ statement. Now, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature Communications Earth and Environment, Greenland’s glaciers have shrunk so much that even if global warming were to stop right now, the ice sheet would continue shrinking. About 20 years however, ice melt started increasing, while snowfall remained the same; a pattern that has persisted throughout the last 10 years. Dr. Jason Box, Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS), Greenland melt season model simulations Obviously this is catastrophic, not only for the wildlife in the region – which is already suffering – but also because of the resulting rise of sea level, gradual though it may be, the effects will be noticeable. In the 1980s and 1990s, Greenland’s ice maintained a rough equilibrium. They discovered a flow of hot rocks, known as a mantle … See our March 18, 2013 post for more discussion of melt calibration. Greenland’s 2020 summer melting: a new normal? This is a false melt signal from seasonal snow and patchy ice areas, where our method of determining surface melting does not work. Net surface mass balance (SMB), which is the snow and rain input minus evaporation and melt runoff, was only slightly less than average at 314 billion tons, or 56 billion tons below the 1981 to 2010 average, according to the MARv3.11 climate model (Figure 5a). Thule, near a large US military base in northwestern Greenland, had a much warmer than average summer, but was still cooler than Nuuk, which is nearly 1,500 kilometers (580 miles) to its south. The Greenland melt images here are updated daily, with a one-day lag. As of now, Greenland’s ice sheet is melting at a rate that would contribute to a rise of sea levels by less than a millimeter every year. Greenland's ice sheet dumps more than 280 billion metric tons of melting ice into the ocean each year. Greenland’s ice sheet is melting much faster than previously thought, threatening hundreds of millions of people with inundation and bringing some of … (a) White and colored areas show the extent of the region where early ice flow maps (1985-1990) can be compared with images acquired up to 30 years later. This bar graph show net surface balance as a result of input vs output into the ice sheet for the 1978 to 2020 period based on reanalysis of weather data and snow-atmosphere model of process from MARv3.11. This graph shows the cumulative melt day area for Greenland for 2020, 2019, 2018, and 2012, as well as the 1981 to 2010 average and typical ranges of cumulative melt day area. Get daily satellite images and information about melting on the Greenland ice sheet. The melting of Greenland's massive ice sheet has now accelerated, scientists announced Wednesday, and shows no signs of slowing down, according to a new study. The 2020 melt season in Greenland is over, finishing thirteenth for cumulative melt-day extent in the 42-year satellite record. These maps reveal substantial reconfigurations of several major glaciers (Figure 6). Credit: National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) Reanalysis data, National Center for Atmospheric ResearchHigh-resolution image, Figure 4. The Greenland ice sheet accumulates snow in its northernmost area and in the central region at high elevations. In 2012, category two Hurricane Sandy clipped New York City, causing $70 billion in damage, flooding subway tunnels and the Brooklyn-Battery tunnel – and that was a 14 foot storm surge. He covers environmental technology for Forbes. Figure 1. If that happens, the ocean would swallow coastal cities across the globe. Ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are melting at a rate which matches climate scientists’ worst-case scenario forecasts and has raised the global sea level by 1.8cm in … In the past decades, scientists have drilled ice cores up to 4 kilometres (2.5 mi) deep. This pattern of temperature and pressure was remarkably consistent through all the individual months of June, July, and August. Greenland ice sheet faces irreversible melting, say scientists Outlook December 03, 2020 16:50 IST Greenland ice sheet faces irreversible melting, say scientists outlookindia.com Roughly 95% of the Greenland ice sheet surface underwent melting during the 2019 summer. What's hot in the news around climate and sea ice and what are scientists talking about now? Even if global warming were to stop today, the ice sheet would continue shrinking. The researchers analyzed satellite data from more than 200 large glaciers that are draining into the ocean around Greenland and measured how much ice breaks off or melts from the glaciers and flows into the ocean. Figure 3. The Greenland Ice Sheet blankets 81 percent of Greenland Island. “We’ve been looking at these remote sensing observations to study how ice discharge and accumulation have varied,” said Michalea King, a researcher at Ohio State University’s Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center and a lead author of the study. The Greenland Ice Sheet is Melting, with Aka Niviâna and Dr. Mathias Nordvig The North is Burning and Adaptation is Necessary Greenland on Fire. Polar Portal: Monitoring ice and climate in the Arctic The top plot shows average air temperature as a difference from the 1981 to 2010 average at the 700 mb level, or about 10,000 feet above sea level, from June 1 through August 31, 2020. They discovered that during the 1980s and 90s, the size of the ice sheet was maintained by a combination of snowfall accumulation and ice melting or calving from glaciers, retaining an equilibrium of sorts. Moon, T. A., A. S. Gardner, B. Csatho, I. Parmuzin, and M. A. Fahnestock. The key factors for surface mass loss and melting for Greenland in 2019 included: 1) exceptional persistence of anticyclonic conditions (high pressure) during the 2019 summer, promoting dry and sunny weather that enhanced the surface melt thanks to the melt-albedo feedback, and 2) low snowfall in the preceding fall-winter-spring, particularly in the high-melt areas of western Greenland. 1a). Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. Read about the data and other problems which occasionally occur in near-real-time data. Nuuk, the capital of Greenland on the central southwestern coast, had summer temperatures very close to average for that region. Back in April, a study published in The Cryosphere suggested that atmospheric circulation patterns contributed in a significant way to Greenland’s rapid loss of ice and as such, the future melt forecasts could’ve been underestimated by half. Satellite data from the last 40 years shows that Greenland’s glaciers have passed a tipping point of sorts, where the snowfall that replenishes the ice sheet each year cannot keep up with the ice that is flowing into the ocean from glaciers. Researchers also see evidence for ice flow rerouting and even abandonment of some glacier outlets. Thus, the 2020 total melt extent tracked at a level larger than about 75 percent of past years in the satellite record after late June. Ice loss is influenced by the ways in which the wind and ocean interact with the ice sheet, CNN said. 2,3,4,5 Ice sheets grow through snowfall, and shrink through surface melting, water runoff, breakup into the ocean (calving), and direct transformation into water vapor (sublimation). The ice sheet, consisting of layers of compressed snow from more than 100,000 years, contains in its ice today's most valuable record of past climates. Consequently, even if climate change to halted, suddenly, enough damage has been done that the glaciers would continue to disappear into the oceans and there would not be enough snowfall by far to rebuild them during the winter. This reconfiguration of the ice sheet has important implications for other elements of the Greenland system, such as the flow of water beneath the ice sheet, and the movement of sediment and nutrients into the fjords. For many fast-flowing glaciers, the research team found that the central channel of fast flow has sped up, but the edges of the channel have slowed, effectively narrowing the width of the fast flow area. With a growing record of satellite imagery and advances in image processing, scientists are now able to better explore the changes to Greenland’s coastal area in the last three decades. Melting was moderately intense in the northeastern region but less so in the southwest, where in recent high-melt years the ice sheet has been losing mass and exposing bare ice. The ice sheet is so big it would stretch from Key West, Florida, to 100 miles beyond Portland, Maine, covering a swath as wide as from Washington, D.C., to Indianapolis, Indiana. ‘Take action’: Melting of Greenland ice sheet could be reversed, say scientists The researchers said despite seasonal periods of growth, Greenland has lost 3.5 trillion tons of ice … Looking for facts and information? Credit: Moon, T. A., et al., 2020, Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth SurfaceHigh-resolution image. Credit: X. Fettweis, Université of Liège, Belgium/MARv3.11 regional climate modelHigh-resolution image, Figure 5b. Of researchers understands more about the same period and abandonment of some glacier outlets, T. A., al.... 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