Home Technology Massive loss of ice in Greenland worries scientists!

Massive loss of ice in Greenland worries scientists!

Last weekend in Greenland, temperatures reached 60 degrees Fahrenheit (15.5 degrees Celsius), which led to the melting of a huge amount of ice.

Experts say it was enough to submerge West Virginia by a foot.

Scientists from the US National Snow and Snow Data Center (NSIDC) told CNN that this “major melt” from July 15 to 17 was due to temperatures 10 degrees above normal. About 80% of the territory of Greenland is covered with a layer of ice. If this ice were to melt completely, the amount of water thrown into the ocean would raise the sea level by 22 feet.

Ohio State University scientists warned in 2020 that it was “enough to double the frequency of storm surge flooding in many of the world’s largest coastal cities” by the end of the century.

Ted Skampos, senior scientist at the University of Colorado’s National Snow and Snow Data Center, told CNN last weekend’s high temperatures weren’t seen in 30 to 40 years of climate-related observations in Greenland.

The Arctic is warming rapidly due to climate change. The latest data for April shows that this region could be warming four times faster than any other region in the world.

Some experts fear that summer sea ice could disappear completely by 2035.

Kotalmis Sailam, a University of Texas scientist currently doing research in Greenland, said the “heat wave” was worrying because she and her team wore T-shirts over the weekend. The Greenland Ice Sheet is the second largest mass of freshwater ice on the planet with an area of ​​approximately 695,000 square miles, second only to Antarctica.

The melting of the ice sheets began in 1990 and has accelerated since 2000.

On July 27, 2021, Marco Tedesco, a climatologist at Columbia University, reported that the Greenland ice sheet lost 8.5 billion tons of surface mass in one day, enough to cover Florida with two inches of water.

Researchers at the Center for Polar and Marine Research found that the ice sheet as a whole has lost 532 gigatonnes of mass, up 15 percent from the previous record in 2012.

And in February 2022, scientists at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge found that the ice sheet was melting from the bottom up, and considered it the biggest contributor to sea level rise in the world.

Source: Daily Mail

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