Greenland mass ice-melting event is latest worrisome sign of climate crisis

David Knowles·Senior EditorThu, August 5, 2021, 1:29 PM·3 min read

In recent days, Greenland’s massive ice sheet has been melting at twice its average summer rate, shedding enough water to cover the entire state of Florida with 5 inches of water, research from Danish scientists shows. 

Greenland’s ice sheet covers just over 660,000 square miles and is 5,000 feet thick in places, but since July 27 it has lost 9.37 billion tons of ice due to rising surface and water temperatures in the Arctic and a recent heat wave that sent temperatures close to 70 degrees. 

“This ice melt is accelerating and it’s going to be unbelievable over the next decade or two,” Harold Wanless, professor of geography and urban sustainability at the University of Miami, told Yahoo News. “We’re just at the beginning.” 

Wanless, who has spent nearly six decades studying the geological impacts of rising seas on global coastlines since the last ice age, noted that mass melting events have been occurring with greater frequency over the past 20 years. 

“In 2012, when Greenland had their first dramatic melt across the whole ice sheet, it was unexpected,” he said. “That wasn’t in the models for decades to have anything like that. Now that has become pretty commonplace.”

In the summer of 2013, Wanless traveled to Greenland and was shocked by what he saw. 

“The top of the ice sheet was amazing. The top 3 feet of it was soft with vertical holes where the water was melting down through this ice,” he said. “I had a friend who went further onto the ice sheet with a military group and they got out of their helicopters and were halfway to their knees in slush. That’s just a very unhealthy ice sheet.”

While summer melting of Arctic ice is not new, warmer ocean water has sped up the rate. A recent study found that while the Earth lost an average of 760 billion tons of ice in the 1990s, that rate grew to more than 1.2 trillion tons in the 2010s. 

“When you’re in a warming climate and the presence of ice, you have these pulses of rapid collapse of ice and that’s what we have to look forward to,” Wanless said. “We just started melting ice in about 1990, and we’re seeing this rapidly accelerate in both polar areas.”

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