Turquoise, pale gray, and sapphire streaks stand out towards a darkish taupe, earthen background in a satellite image from the European Union’s Copernicus Earth statement program. It’s a mesmerizing image, conjuring extra fast affiliations with a portray than our planet, nevertheless it’s not a welcome sight for local weather scientists. Instead, the brand new picture illustrates a latest, huge ice soften occasion in Greenland and the continuing toll of local weather change.

For a couple of days earlier this month in Greenland, it was scorching—actually scorching, a minimum of for the principally Arctic landmass. In components of the nation, temperatures hovered round 60 levels Fahrenheit (15.5 Celsius), greater than 10 levels hotter than the common for July, in line with a report from CNN.

Those unusually excessive temperatures triggered wide-scale snow and ice soften throughout Greenland’s ice sheet. In simply three days, from July 15-17, the landmass misplaced about 18 billion tons of water. Or, in different phrases, sufficient water to cowl your entire state of West Virginia in a foot of water.

Then, the melting intensified even additional. Between 8 and 10 billion tons of water per day melted and ran-off from the ice sheet from July 20 to July 23, stated Ted Scambos, a glaciologist on the University of Colorado, in an electronic mail to Gizmodo. The Copernicus satellite tv for pc picture was captured on the top of that soften occasion on July 22.

All of that meltwater carried tens of thousands of years of glacial sediment together with it. The opaque, putty coloured patches bleeding into the intense blue fjord seen within the satellite tv for pc picture are that sediment (successfully, glacial mud) heading towards the Labrador Sea. Godthåbsfjord, labeled within the picture, is often called Nuup Kangerlua in Greenlandic and is situated on the Southwestern coast of the nation. It’s one of many largest fjord techniques on the planet, and Greenland’s capital, Nuuk, is situated at its mouth.

Since final week, the spike in Greenland’s ice soften has fallen and leveled off nearer to what’s customary for this time yr. However, giant soften anomalies stay worrying. In 2021, it rained on the summit of Greenland’s ice sheet for the primary time in recorded historical past. The identical month, the landmass misplaced sufficient ice in a single day to cowl Florida. In 2019, Greenland misplaced 532 billion tons of ice—the most important quantity ever recorded in a single yr.

As the nation’s ice sheet melts, world sea levels rise, triggering extra extreme and frequent flooding worldwide. If all the ice on Greenland have been to soften, it will elevate sea ranges by about 24 toes. But the melting additionally triggers a detrimental suggestions loop. As extra soften happens and water swimming pools on the ice sheet floor or leaves uncovered rock behind, the landmass turns into much less reflective. A much less reflective Greenland absorbs extra warmth and contributes to Arctic warming. So Greenland’s melting ice sheet turns into a self-propelling course of.

The Arctic is already warming greater than twice as fast as the remainder of the planet, and we can’t afford further losses if we wish to stave off the worst impacts of local weather change.