“They described the event as being without precedent because such a massive loss of ice has not been observed by humans before, although estimates derived from studying old, compressed ice suggest that melts on this scale happen about once every 150 years.“
The Greenland ice sheet is melting at an “unprecedented” rate, according to NASA satellite data that shows 97 per cent of the vast mass is undergoing some form of melting.
“This was so extraordinary that at first I questioned the result: was this real or was it due to a data error?” a NASA researcher, Son Nghiem, said.
About half the ice sheet usually shows signs of melting in a northern hemisphere summer, but the satellite data shows that between July 8 and July 12 the melt extended to cover almost all of Greenland.
Warm air blows by and it melts. Cold air returns and it refreezes.
The water doesn’t have a chance to GO anywhere. It is like a thin film of water forming on an ice cube.
That’s how snow turns to ice.
Greenland is covered with *ice* because all the *snow* that has fallen there has been through this process at least once.
The instruments that discriminate from earth orbit between ice and water can’t tell how *deep* the water is. It’s less than a millimeter thick in many places.
They’re so desperate that even a silly millimeter of melt gets them warmed up, pun intended, but the news that sea levels have been falling sends them in silent denial.