Greenland ice that melted could cover Florida in 2 inches of water

Greenland is going through a significant melting event as temperatures surge in the Arctic. The amount of ice that melted on Tuesday is enough to cover the entire state of Florida in two inches of water. According to Danish government researchers who monitor the ice sheet. The researchers, who post the results of their monitoring on the website Polar Portal, said the melting event on Wednesday was the third-largest single day loss of ice in Greenland since 1950 — with the others happening in 2012 and 2019. The world’s largest island lost more than 8.5 billion tons of surface mass on Tuesday and 18.4 billion tons since Sunday, according to the Denmark Meteorological Institute. Massive ice sheets can melt rapidly when the air temperature is warm. But warmer ocean water is also eroding the ice sheet around the edges, breaking off massive icebergs that contribute to sea-level rise. As humans release heat-trapping greenhouse gas, the warming atmosphere thaws the fresh white ice — which reflects the sun’s energy back into space — on the surface. That exposes the darker ice below which absorbs solar energy and causes more melting.

Massive melting event in Greenland. While not as extreme as in 2019 in terms of gigatons (left image - but still would be enough to cover Florida with two inches of water), the area over which melting takes place (right image) is even a bit larger than two years ago. pic.twitter.com/rEeDIlYTA7

— Polar Portal (@PolarPortal) July 29, 2021

“It’s a significant melt,” Ted Scambos, a senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado, said. “July 27th saw most of the eastern half of Greenland from the northern tip all the way to the southern tip mostly melted, which is unusual.” Ice loss around the world has increased rapidly as human-caused climate change continues to warm the planet. Earth has lost a staggering 61,729,433,411,765,720 pounds of ice since the mid-1990s, a large portion of which was from the Arctic, including the Greenland ice sheet