Greenland Summit

Greenland Summit

Subject – Environment

Context – On Saturday last week, for the first time on record, the summit of Greenland received rain and not snow, just as temperatures at the spot went above freezing for the third time in less than ten years. The event has sparked fear as scientists are pointing to it as evidence that Greenland is warming rapidly.

Concept –

• As per the US National Snow and Ice Data Center, this was the heaviest rainfall that the ice sheet received since record keeping began in 1950, with Sunday witnessing a rate of ice melting that was seven times more than the daily average that is observed at this time of the year.
• Greenland, which is the world’s largest island located between the Arctic and Atlantic oceans, has three-quarters of its surface covered with a permanent ice sheet, which is increasingly coming under threat because of climate change.
• At the highest point on Greenland’s ice sheet, America’s National Science Foundation maintains a Summit Station, a research facility that observes changes occurring over the island as well as in Arctic weather.
• The rain, coupled with warm conditions, caused a major melting event at the summit, adding to concerns of rapid ice melting running off into the ocean in volumes, thus accelerating global sea level rise.
• Greenland, which is two-thirds the size of India, already witnessed one of its most severe melting events of the past decade last month, when it lost 8.5 billion tons of surface mass in one day– the third such extreme event in the past decade.
• The UN’s “code red” climate report released last week concluded that the burning of fossil fuels led to Greenland melting in the last 20 years.
• The rapid melting is also threatening polar bears, which now have to make their way hundreds of kilometres towards Greenland’s interior from the coasts, where they usually find enough food.