The heatwave, which broke records in Europe last month, has passed over Greenland, which had already had a milder-tan-usual start of summer. Photo / AP
The heatwave, which broke records in Europe last month, has passed over Greenland, which had already had a milder-tan-usual start of summer. Photo / AP
The heatwave that smashed high temperature records in five European countries a week ago is now over Greenland, accelerating the melting of the island's ice sheet and causing massive ice loss in the Arctic.
Greenland, the world's largest island, is a semi-autonomous Danish territory between the Atlantic and Arctic oceans that has 82 per cent of its surface covered in ice.
The area of the Greenland ice sheet that is showing indications of melt has been growing daily, and hit a record 56.5 per cent for this year on Thursday, said Ruth Mottram, a climate scientist with the Danish Meteorological Institute. She says that's expected to expand and peak yesterday before cooler temperatures slow the pace of the melt.
More than 10 billion tonnes of ice was lost to the oceans by surface melt on Thursday alone, creating a net mass ice loss of some 197 billion tonnes from Greenland in July, she said.
"It looks like the peak will be today. But the long-term forecast is for continuing warm and sunny weather in Greenland, so that means the amount of the ice loss will continue," she said yesterday in a telephone interview from Copenhagen.
The scope of Thursday's ice melt is a number difficult to grasp. To understand just how much ice is being lost, a mere 1 billion tonnes — or 1 gigatonne — of ice loss is equivalent to about 400,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools, the Danish Meteorological Institute said . And 100 billion tonnes corresponds to a 0.28mm rise in global sea levels.
Mottram said since June 1 — roughly the start of the ice-loss season — the Greenland ice sheet has lost 240 gigatonnes — or 240 billion tonnes — this year. That compares with 290 gigatonnes lost overall in the 2012 melt season, which usually goes through to the end of August.
The ice-melt this summer in in Nunatarssuk, Greenland, is clear from the air. Photo / AP
A study in June by scientists in the United States and Denmark said melting ice in Greenland alone will add between 5cm and 33cm to rising global sea levels by the year 2100. If all the ice in Greenland melted — which would take centuries — the world's oceans would rise by 7.2m, the study found.
The current melting has been brought on by the arrival of the same warm air from North Africa and Spain that sent temperatures soaring on European cities and towns last week, setting national records in Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Britain.
In Russia, meanwhile, forest fires caused by hot, dry weather and spread by high winds are raging over nearly 30,000sq km of territory in Siberia and the Russian Far East — an area the size of Belgium. The smoke from these fires, some of them in Arctic territory, is so heavy it can easily be seen in satellite photos and is causing air quality problems in towns and some cities, including Russia's third-largest city, Novosibirsk. Residents want the Russian Government to do more to fight the blazes.
Greenland has also been battling a slew of Arctic wildfires, something that Mottram said was uncommon in the past.
In Greenland, the melt area this year is the second-biggest in terms of ice area affected, behind more than 90 per cent in 2012, said Mark Serreze, director of the Snow and Ice Data Centre in Boulder, Colorado, which monitors ice sheets globally. Records go back to 1981.
A lot of what melts can later refreeze onto the ice sheet, but because of the conditions ahead of this summer's heat wave, the amount of ice lost for good this year might be the same as in 2012 or more, according to scientists. They noted a long build-up to this summer's ice melt — including higher overall temperatures for months — and a very dry winter with little snow in many places, which would normally offer some protection to glacier ice.
Large rivers of melting water form on an ice sheet in western Greenland and drain into moulin holes that empty into the ocean from underneath the ice. Photo / AP
"This is certainly a weather event superimposed on this overall trend of warmer conditions" that have increasingly melted Greenland ice over the long-term, Serreze said.
Compounding the melt, the Greenland ice sheet started out behind this year because of the low ice and snow accumulation, said Snow and Ice Data Centre scientist Twila Moon.
With man-made climate change, "there's a potential for these kind of rates to become more common 50 years from now", Moon said.
Heatwaves have always occurred, but Mike Sparrow, a spokesman for the United Nations World Meteorological Organisation, noted that as global temperatures have risen, extreme heatwaves are now occurring at least 10 times more frequently than a century ago. This year, the world saw its hottest month of June since records began.
"These kind of heatwaves are weather events and can occur naturally but studies have shown that both the frequency and intensity of these heatwaves have increased due to global warming," Sparrow said from Geneva.
He noted that sea-ice spread in the Arctic and Antarctic are both currently at record lows.
"When people talk about the average global temperature increasing by a little more than 1C, that's not a huge amount to notice if you're sitting in Hamburg or London, but that's a global average and it's much greater in the polar regions," he said.
Even though temperatures will be going down in Greenland in the coming days, the ice melt is not likely to stop anytime soon, Mottram said.
"Over the last couple of days, you could see the warm wave passing over Greenland," she said. "That peak of warm air has passed over the summit of the ice sheet, but the clear skies are almost as important, or maybe even more important, for the total melt of the ice sheet." She added that clear skies are likely to continue in Greenland "so we can still get a lot of ice melt even if the temperature is not spectacularly high".
