There is two years difference in the "Greenland Melt." This is a significant difference that should be worrying everyone.
Good work NASA.
Early spring or early summer, (click here) the surface of the Greenland Ice Sheet transforms from a vast white landscape of snow and ice to one bejeweled with blue meltwater streams, rivers, and lakes. In 2016, the transition started early and fast.
“This year we had some really early season melt events that kick-started things,” said Allen Pope, a scientist at the National Snow & Ice Data Center (NSIDC). According to an NSIDC blog post, the ice sheet saw three extreme spikes in melt by June 19. As a result, the pace of melting so far is ahead of the past three seasons, but behind the record melt year of 2012.
Coastal areas have been generally warmer than average, and sometimes extreme. For instance, temperatures in Nuuk soared to 24 degrees Celsius (75 degrees Fahrenheit) on June 9, 2016—the highest June temperature ever recorded there. Interior areas were slightly cooler than usual.
On June 15, 2016, the Advanced Land Imager (ALI) on NASA’s Earth Observing-1 satellite acquired a natural-color image of an area just inland from the coast of southwestern Greenland (120 kilometers southeast of Ilulisat and 500 kilometers north-northeast of Nuuk). According to Marco Tedesco, a professor at Columbia University’s Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, melting in this area began relatively early in April but was not sustained. It started up again in May and grew into the watery June scene pictured above.
Surface melt can directly contribute to sea level rise via runoff. It can also force its way through crevasses to the base of a glacier, temporarily speeding up ice flow and indirectly contributing to sea level rise. Also, ponding of meltwater can “darken” the ice sheet’s surface and lead to further melting....
