For a few days this month, NASA’s images of the Greenland ice sheet turned red, indicating that for a while, almost the entire surface of the vast frozen island was melting.
The big melt in Greenland is part of an overall picture of an unusually warm season across the Arctic, with much of the sea route from WesternEurope to the Pacific as free of ice in July as it normally would be by summer’s end, the chief of the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center said on Wednesday.
On an average summer, about half of Greenland’s surface ice melts, according to NASA. This summer, satellites showed about 97 percent of the ice sheet thawed at some point in mid-July.
On July 8, there was a big white area in the middle of the image, indicating that 40 percent of Greenland’s surface had thawed; by July 12, virtually the whole island was pictured as red, showing widespread defrosting.
For Mark Serreze, director and senior research scientist at the Colorado-based National Snow and Ice Data Center, one interesting aspect of the Greenland event is its relative rarity.
