Greenland is Fast Melting

In a report by Seth Borenstein to The Associated Press, Earth's future is being written in fast-melting Greenland.

Summer is hitting the Arctic island hard with record-breaking heat and extreme melt this year.

Helheim Glacier is where Earth's refrigerator door is left open where glaciers dwindle ~ and seas begin to rise.

New York University air and ocean scientist David Holland, who is tracking what's happening in Greenland from both above and below, calls it the end of the planet.

He is referring to geography more than the future. In many ways where the planet is warmer and its watery future is being written. It's so warm inside the Arctic Circle, that on an August day, coats are left on the ground Holland and colleagues work on the watery melting ice without gloves. In one of the closest towns, Kulusk, the morning temperature reached 10.7 C.

The ice Holland is standing on is thousands of years old. It will be gone within a year or two ~ adding more water to rising seas worldwide. By the end of the summer, Greenland's record shattering heat and extreme melt, about 440 billion tons of ice...maybe more...will have melted or calved off Greenland's giant ice sheet, scientists estimate. That's enough water to flood Pennsylvania or the country of Greece and and to a depth of 35 centres. One of the places hit hardest, this 'hot Greenland summer' is on the south-eastern edge of the giant frozen island: Helheim, one of Greenland's fastest-retreating-glaciers.has shrunk about 10 kilometres since scientists came here iin 2005.

Several scientists such as NASA oceanographer Josh Wllis, who is also in Greenland studying melting ice from above said what's happening is a combination of man-made climate change ~ and natural, but weird weather patterns.

Glaciers in Greenland do shrink in the summer and grow in the winter, but nothing this year.

Summit Station, a research camp nearly 3,200 metres high and far north, warmed to above freezing twice this year for a record total of 16.5 hours in 2012,,.once in 1889...and also in the Middle Ages.

At Helheim, the ice, snow and water seemed to on and on, sandwiched by bare dirt mountains that now show no signs of ice, but get covered in the winter The only thing that gives a sense of scale is the helicopter, an almost imperceptible red speck against the ice cliffs where Helheim stops and its remnants remains..Those cliffs are somewhere between 70 metres and 100 metres high. Just next to them are Helheim's renbabts ~ sea ice, snow and icebergs ~ forming a most white expanse, with a mishmash of shapes and textures.

As pilot, Martin Norregaard tries to land his helicopter, on the broken up part of what used to be glacier...now a mush called melange...he looks for ice speckled with dirt...a sign that it's firm enough for the chopper to set down on. Pure white ice could possibly conceal a deep crevasse that leads to a cold and deadly plunge

Holland states that it takes a really long time to grow and ice sheet...thousands and thousands...but they can be broken up or or destroyed quite rapidly.

Along with NASA's Willis, he suspects that warm salty water that comes in part by the Gulf Stream in North America is playing a bigger role than previously thought in melting Greenland's ice.

In tiny Kulusuk, about a 40-minute, Mugu Utuaq says the winter that used to last as much as 10 months when he was a boy, can now be as short as 5 months. That matters to him because as the fourth-ranked-dogsledder in Greenland, he has 23 dogs and needs to race them.

“People are getting rid of their dogs because there's no season,” said Yewlin who used to run a sled dog team for visiting tourists at a hotel in neighbouring town Tasillaq ~ but no longer can do.

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“Greenland is not for sale ~ and the idea of selling it to United States is absurd,” stated Denmark's Prime Minister.

Greenland is actually the world's biggest island ~ by area ~ that it is not a continent.

About 836,330 square miles including other offshore islands.

Almost 80% of the land mass is covered in ice cap.

Its main point of interest is Northeast Greenland National Park.

In reading the foregoing report to The Associated Press, I concluded that this Arctic island is appropriately named GREENland! So sad! Yet today true, due the effects of Climate Change.

Written by MBK...August 25, 2019
Comments appreciated