Category: Greenland melting

A lot of stories erupted this morning due to NASA satellite analysts' revelation yesterday that they just saw something on Greenland they had never seen before: water everywhere. That is, it's still pretty much white. It is still mostly covered in a glacial mass reaching thousands of feet in thickness. But the sunny part on top was abruptly melting, north to south, east to west. One imagines an unbroken wetness of sheets and rivulets and rivers and probably more noise from the maws of those ice-boring waterfalls called moulins that drain to the bedrock beneath. One supposes it could be an instrument error. But the folks running the multiple satellites at work say they checked. Ergo, the twinned images of ice v. melted-on-top, taken just four days apart earlier this month, are in wide circulation.

It's a peculiar thing and is unavoidable news. It could not  last of course. Nobody should think a tipping point or something else drastic-sounding is upon us that...