Current Events > Greenland is melting

(+) Yeah! (+)

In the 1980s, wintertime snows in Greenland roughly balanced summertime melt from the ice sheet, and the conventional wisdom among scientists was that it might take thousands of years for the ice to completely melt under pressure from global warming.

Thats all changed now.

With a decade or two of hindsight, scientists now believe Greenland passed an important tipping point around 2003, and since then its melt rate has more than quadrupled.

This week alone, Greenland will lose about 50 billion tons of ice, enough for a permanent rise in global sea levels by about 0.1mm. So far in July, the Greenland ice sheet has lost 160 billion tons of ice enough to cover Florida in about six feet of water. According to IPCC estimates, thats roughly the level of melt a typical summer will have in 2050 under the worst-case warming scenario if we dont take meaningful action to address climate change. Under that same scenario, this weeks brutal, deadly heat wave would be normal weather in the 2070s.