In Record Summer Heat, 97 Percent of Greenland's Surface Ice Turns to Slush
Greenland Ice Melt Jesse Allen, NASA Earth Observatory and Nicolo E. DiGirolamo, SSAI and Cryospheric Sciences Laboratory This has been a sensationally hot summer for America, with records breaking daily. But Greenland seems to have just claimed the heat-related phenomenon crown, with 97 percent of its ice sheet turning to slush. The even stranger part? It might be completely normal--at least for now. The melting isn't a one-off event; every summer Greenland's ice melts some amount. But it's usually about half, and in the 30 years we've been keeping a satellite eye on the changes, we haven't seen anything like this. It was so out of the ordinary, in fact, that scientists from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory questioned if it was caused by some kind of malfunction. The melt had to be confirmed independently by other climatologists. By July 8, according to the satellite information, 40 percent was melted. Four days...