Supporting the claims of environmentalists who warned us about the climate change, Greenland has just lost record-breaking 11 billion tons of ice in a single day amid a heatwave.
Following weeks of unusually high temperatures around the globe, scientists warned that Greenland’s ice sheet is losing drastic amounts of ice every day, with the record set on August 1 when the country lost as much as 11 billion tons of ice.
For a better understanding of the crisis at hand, the amount of melted ice during that day was equivalent to filling up 4.4 million Olympic swimming pools.
In addition, the abnormal melting of the ice sheet caused sea levels to rise by as much as 0.5 mm in only one month.
“This year Greenland and other parts of the Arctic have experienced some record-breaking temperatures,” Glaciologist Dr. Andrew Sole of the University of Sheffield said in an interview with The Independent.
“In mid-June, temperatures along the eastern coast of Greenland were up to 9C above the 1981-to-2010 average.
“In early July I was on an expedition to northeast Greenland in Kronprins Christian Land at 80 degrees north, and we measured a temperature of 17C in the shade.
“In addition, Alert, a military base and meteorological station at the northern tip of Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic at 82 degrees north, experienced a temperature of 21C in mid-July.”
While the doomsday preppers have already started preparing for potential consequences of the rising temperatures, some experts have calmed the situation down by claiming that balance could be restored if a bout of cold weather was to follow the heatwave.
“We need to wait for scientists to go about producing, vetting and releasing scientific results before we can say that any significant changes have occurred to the melting rate due to this heatwave,” Arizona’s Planetary Science Institute Professor, Jeffrey Kargel, added.
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