In August of 2021, rainfall occurred at the summit of the massive Greenland ice sheet. That event was unprecedented, and it frightened people, those that are aware anyways, across the earth. As usual, the climate shock to the Arctic did not make news, except for a few print media outlets along with weather pages.
Daily Kos readers knew about it. The site is blessed with multiple green diarists reporting on the tragedy unfolding across Greenland. in fact, diarists cover the climate crisis, from despicable deniers, and green energy to all aspects of the climate crisis. However, researchers from Denmark, France, and Switzerland have unraveled the extraordinary ice melt mystery at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland in breaking climate news.
From Kasha Patel, writing for the Washington Post Capital Weather Gang:
Jason Box waited for the skies to clear. The climatologist’s team was already in southern Greenland to begin their research project, but he was stuck in Nuuk, the country’s capital, because weather delayed his travels. Dark clouds loomed overhead, while the patter of rain echoed loudly as it fell onto the ocean.
Unbeknown to him, this same weather system was causing a historic melt event 660 miles away at the summit of Greenland. On Aug. 14, 2021, the system drew exceptionally warm and moist air from southern latitudes northward, increasing temperatures around 32 degrees (18 Celsius) higher than normal. Rain, not snow, fell on Greenland’s summit for the first time on record. Melting persisted over the next two weeks, covering 46 percent of the ice sheet. This was the largest melt event to occur so late in the year.
“The weather was atrocious,” said Box, a professor at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland. “I didn’t know that it was as big as it was.”
The “atrocious” weather was caused by a warm, narrow band of water vapor in the sky, known as an atmospheric river. The term “atmospheric river” has recently become popularized in media due to its role in extreme weather. As the plume of water vapor makes landfall, it precipitates as rain or snow. In the fall and winter, atmospheric rivers bring much of California’s annual precipitation but can also unleash intense flooding. In July 2021, an atmospheric river brought flooding to Germany, which killed more than 200 people.
It didn't only rain at Summit Camp—rain was measured by new automatic weather stations placed across the ice sheet by GEUS' ice-sheet monitoring projects PROMICE and GC-Net.
Studying detailed data from these stations alongside measurements of surface reflectivity, or albedo, from the Copernicus Sentinel-3 satellite mission and information on atmospheric circulation patterns, the researchers discovered that the rain had been preceded by a heatwave at a time of year when seasonal melting is usually slowing down.
It turns out that the incredible melting of the ice sheet would have occurred even without the rainfall at all. Instead, it was from an atmospheric river that brought hot, humid air that Dr. Box described as steam in a kitchen in the below video. The ARs have been making weather news worldwide as a harbinger of devastating natural disasters.
Climate change is a threat multiplier. Let's hope more of the media begins to connect the dots. Please put it on the front page and talk about it non-stop for years.
"There is an irony. It's not really the rain that did the damage to the snow and ice, it's the darkening effect of the meltwater and how the heat from the event erased snow that had overlaid darker ice across the lower third of the ice sheet.
"Unusually warm atmospheric rivers swept along Greenland in the late summer months, bringing potent melt conditions when the melt season was drawing to a close."
In fact, this sudden increase of surface ice melt on Greenland could have happened without any rain ever touching the ground.
The main culprit was the heat itself, melting and completely removing the surface snow, thereby changing the surface albedo, Greek for "whiteness," so that Greenland snow and ice absorbed more of the Sun's rays.
The researchers found that, between 19 and 20 August 2021, this melt caused the altitude of the ice sheet's snowline near Kangerlussuaq to retreat in elevation by a whopping 788 meters, the snowline retreated, exposing a wide area of dark bare ice.
Under normal circumstances, snow would cover and insulate this ice, but the snow melted suddenly and exposed the ice to heat, causing even more melting.
Seven hundred eighty-eight meters is just under a half-mile.
The researchers concluded that the heatwave illustrated a "melt-albedo feedback that amplifies the melt impact of the initial melt perturbation."
In other words, documented Arctic melt feedback on the ice is now a part of the Arctic climate system.
The Guardian wrote about the rainfall event in 2021, which warned readers about coastal migration due to sea-level rise. A nature study has found mass migration will begin as early as eight years due to the rapid melt of Greenland.
If the people of Miami, Shanghai, Tokyo, Mumbai, Lagos, Bangkok and New York are not concerned, they should be. The great Greenland ice melt is a climate crisis sword of Damocles for all coastal, low-lying, densely populated areas. No other single factor will probably contribute more to sea level rise over the next few decades.
A consortium of climate scientists writing two years ago in Nature, a prestigious scientific journal, concluded that if Greenland continues to melt, in one bad-case scenario after another, tens of millions of people could be in danger of yearly flooding and displacement by 2030 – less than nine years from now.
Video by Jason Box on the melting event. Good stuff to know.
Thanks to Clutch Cargo for the list of people we must elect to protect so many things we love from insanity.
As a convenience for readers, here are the web sites of some Democratic nominees for the U.S. Senate. These candidates need volunteers and contributions. Note that some states with Republican incumbents, such as Wisconsin, Florida, and Iowa, have not had their primaries yet. Eventually, a list of Democratic U.S. Senate candidates, such as this, will be longer.
Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia (incumbent)
Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada (incumbent)
Tim Ryan of Ohio (challenger; the Republican is also a challenger)
John Fetterman of Pennsylvania (challenger; the Republican is also a challenger)
Cheri Beasley of North Carolina (challenger; the Republican is also a challenger)
Sen. Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire (incumbent)