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Peak of Greenland’s ice sheet records rain for the first time
According to the Colorado-based National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), on the highest point of the Greenland ice sheet it rained for hours on August 14 and temperatures remained above freezing point for nine hours.
In another sign that the climate is changing fast, Greenland, which had been experiencing a heatwave alongside much of the northern hemisphere, recently witnessed rainfall for several hours.
According to the Colorado-based National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), on the highest point of the Greenland ice sheet it rained for hours on August 14 and temperatures remained above freezing point for nine hours. “There is no previous report of rainfall at this location, which reaches 3,216m in elevation,” NSIDC reported.
Greenland’s ice sheet seeing rainfall for the first time in recorded history is a worrying sign for climate scientists. “Greenland, like the rest of the world, is changing,” University of Colorado Boulder glaciologist Ted Scambos told The Washington Post. “We now see three melting events in a decade in Greenland, and before 1990, that happened about once every 150 years. And now rainfall, in an area where rain never fell. Like the heatwave in the [US Pacific] northwest, it’s something that’s hard to imagine without the influence of global climate change.”
“We are crossing thresholds not seen in millennia... this is not going to change until we adjust what we’re doing to the air,” Scambos told CNN.
