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Greenland’senormous ice weather sheet has been strike by a " monolithic melting case , " with enough meth fly in a single Clarence Shepard Day Jr. last week to cover the whole of Florida in two inch ( 5 cm ) of water , Danish investigator have found .
Since July 27 , roughly 9.37 billion long ton ( 8.5 billion measured ton ) of ice rink has been lost per day from the surface of the tremendous icing sheet — twice its normal fair rate of deprivation during summertime , Polar Portal , a Danish site die hard by Arctic climate researchers , report . The huge loss comes after temperature in north Greenland soared to above 68 degrees Fahrenheit ( 20 grade Celsius ) , which is dual the summertime average , theDanish Meteorological Institute reported .
Ice receding from a glacier near Kangerlussuaq, Greenland. This photo was taken during a helicopter tour of the region with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in May 2021.
High temperatures on July 28 stimulate the third - large individual - twenty-four hour period loss of ice in Greenland since 1950 ; the second and first biggest individual - day losses occurred in 2012 and 2019 . Greenland ’s yearly trash loss begin in 1990 . In recent old age it has accelerated to rough four times the level before 2000 .
Related : Images of melting : Earth ’s vanishing ice
Even though the amount of ice that unthaw in this summertime ’s outcome was less than two years ago , in some ways it could be worse .
" While not as extreme as in 2019 in terms of gigatons , the domain over which melt takes place is even a flake larger than two year ago , " the Polar Portal researcherswrote in a tweet .
spherical ocean levels would rise by about 20 human foot ( 6 meters ) if all of Greenland ’s ice melted , according to an estimate by the U.S.National Snow and Ice Data Center(NSIDC ) .
Xavier Fettweis , a mood scientist at the University of Liège , Belgium , calculate that around 24 billion rafts ( 22 billion measured ton ) of ice rink thaw from Greenland ’s shabu sheet on July 28 , with 13 billion piles ( 12 billion metric tons ) making its room into the sea . Hetweetedthat the other 11 billion tons ( 10 billion measured ton ) of melted methamphetamine was reabsorbed " by the snowpack thanks to the recent heavy snowfall . "
Fettweis attribute the cause of the quickening in the twenty-four hour period ’s melting to an atmospherical event , call an anticyclone , above the continent . Anticyclones are regions of high pressure which turn on the air contained within them to sink , warming as it does so while in the summer and creating conditions where live weather can persist in one area for a long time .
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Greenland ’s melting season typically go from June to early September . This year ’s melting season has already seen more than 110 billion tons ( 100 billion metrical short ton ) of chalk disappear into the ocean , according to Danish government data point .
Greenland ’s icing flat solid is the only permanent ice sheet onEarthbesides the one inAntarcticaand is roughly three times the sizing of Texas , with an region of roughly 656,000 square miles ( 1.7 million straight kilometers ) , harmonize to the NSIDC .
The Greenland and Antarctic methamphetamine sheets make up 99 % of Earth ’s fresh water reserve , according to the NSIDC , but both have been losing mint at an accelerated rate due toclimate change . The sheet have lost a aggregate 7 trillion lashings ( 6.4 trillion metric tons ) of ice since 1994 , according to a subject area published January 2021 in thejournal The Cryosphere .
Greenland ’s trend of accelerated thaw is one that scientists are seeing in other glacial region all over the world . Between 2000 and 2019 , Earth ’s glaciers lost an norm of 293.7 billion tons ( 266 billion metrical net ton ) of mass per class , accounting for 21 % of remark ocean - grade rise across that metre menstruum , Live Science previously reported . Another study has estimated that Earth is lose enough ice every twelvemonth to get across a frozen field the sizing of Lake Superior , Live Science antecedently reported .
Originally write on Live Science .
