Ice Melting In Greenland? It’s Summer!

I’ve been away cycling in Norfolk for the last few days, even though it was apparently shut! While away, this familiarly hysterical story appeared in the “Independent”:

An extraordinary photograph of huskies pulling sleds through ankle-deep meltwaters on top of an ice sheet in Greenland has brought attention to the uncharacteristically warm temperatures affecting the Arctic.

Danish climatologist Steffen M Olsen took the picture on 13 June while on a routine mission through the Inglefield Gulf in northwest Greenland.

The rapidly melting ice caused difficult and dangerous conditions for the team of climatologists who were retrieving weather station equipment from the area.

The thin layer of water was standing on top of an ice sheet around 1.2 metres deep, Dr Olsen said on Twitter.

“We know the ice is around 1.2m thick and that we have about 870m [of] water below us. Together with the local hunters we have been measuring also ice thickness from December to now. An ongoing activity for almost a decade now.”

Dr Olsen’s colleague Ruth Mottram, an expert on Greenland’s ice sheet, told The Independent the onset of unusually warm temperatures combined with very few cracks in the ice meant the rapid accumulation of meltwater was unable to drain through the solid sheet of ice.

“Last week saw the onset of very warm conditions in Greenland and in fact much of the rest of the Arctic, driven by warmer air moving up from the south.”

She added: “The DMI weather station nearby at Qaanaaq airport registered a high of 17.3C on Wednesday and 15C on Thursday, which is pretty warm for Northern Greenland, even in summer!”

Greenland is currently in the grip of near-record levels of ice melt, with the day Mr Olsen took the photograph – 13 June – seeing the country lose more than 2 gigatons (equal to 2 billion tons) of ice on that day alone.

The sudden spike in melting “is unusual, but not unprecedented”, Thomas Mote, a research scientist at the University of Georgia who studies Greenland’s climate, told CNN.

“It is comparable to some spikes we saw in June of 2012,” he said.

That year saw record-setting ice melt with almost the entire ice sheet experiencing melting for the first time in recorded history.

The first thing to point out is that this is nothing to do with Greenland’s ice sheet, despite the misleading inference to that effect in the first paragraph. It is, in fact, fjord ice, which freezes every winter and melts every summer.

This year it is beginning to melt slightly earlier than usual, because of warm air moving up from the south. This is called “weather,” and has nothing to do with “global warming.”

As is noted, such weather is not unprecedented. Indeed, the temperature peak of 17.3C is not even unusual for Qaanaaq, where the record is set at 20C.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qaanaaq

At nearby Thule, similar temperatures have been recorded in many past years. On 29th June 1959, for instance, the temperature hit 17.2C. Recordings only began in 1951, and it is highly likely that temperatures were higher in the 1930s and ’40s:

http://climexp.knmi.nl/gdcntmax.cgi?id=someone@somewhere&WMO=GLW00017605&STATION=THULE_OP_SITE&extraargs=

You may recall that just a year ago, they were complaining about Greenland’s lost summer, when the snow and ice persisted well into summer on Greenland’s east coast, causing havoc for sea birds trying to breed:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/late-snowpack-signals-a-lost-summer-for-greenlands-shorebirds/

As to claims about two billion tonnes of ice melting in one day, such large numbers are intended purely to alarm people, but are in reality are tiny and utterly meaningless.

The ice sheet gains that sort of amount of ice daily between October and May, with daily peaks of 5 gigatonnes (Gt) very common. In summer, daily losses typically run at about 4 Gt and can often peak at 8 Gt.

Over the three summer months as a whole, the ice sheet normally loses about 200 Gt.

http://polarportal.dk/en/greenland/surface-conditions/

As is so often the case with these sort of stories, they are deliberately designed to alarm. But when the hype and exaggeration is cleared away, we are left with nothing out of the ordinary at all.

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