The amount of ice collectively lost last Wednesday and Thursday, all ten billion tonnes of it, would be enough to cover Florida in almost thirteen centimetres of water…… According to a Twitter post by climate scientist Martin Stendel, the amount of ice collectively lost on Thursday and Wednesday this week, the ice sheet’s biggest surface melt day since 2012, with around 60 percent of the frozen expanse undergoing at least 1 millimeter of melting would be enough to cover Florida in almost five inches of water.
Andrew Freedman and Jason Samenow reported for the Washington Post, Thursday’s melting event outpaced all data collected since 1950, when scientists first started tracking the ice sheet’s daily mass loss.
“This model, which uses weather data and observations to build a record of ice and snowfall, and net change in mass of the ice sheet, is remarkably accurate,” Ted Scambos, a senior researcher at Colorado’s National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), tells thePost. “I would accept the result as fact.”
In the Conversation, Australian National University climate researcher Nerilie Abram points out that the Arctic is especially sensitive to climate change. Rising temperature there are spurring rampant ice loss that, in turn, drives the thermometer even further upward in a self-reinforcing vicious cycle. (Melting snow and ice darken the ice sheet’s surface, enabling it to absorb more heat and melt at a higher rate.) As a result, temperatures in the region are rising twice as fast as the global average.
Almost as amazing is that this hardly gets a mention in mainstream media. I just don’t know what it will take to wake them all up, because this is a serious event that might even be evidence of a tipping point. We won’t know until it’s in the rear view mirror…
Damn the Matrix 