3 AUGUST 2019 STATE OBSERVER NEWS JAMMU
Greenland’s ice sheet witnessed its biggest melting down of the season as it lost around 11 billion tonnes of surface ice to oceans in a single day, due to the persistent heatwave causing record high temperatures across Europe.The 11 billion tonnes of ice loss reported on Wednesday, is equivalent to 4.4 million Olympic swimming pools.Although Greenland’s ice sheets melt every summer, this year’s melting down season could trigger one of country’s biggest ice melts since 1950. This is because of high temperatures observed for the past four months from May, according to news website CNN.In July alone, around 197 billion tonnes of ice in Greenland has melted into the Atlantic ocean, which is 36 per cent more than scientists expect in an average year, according to Ruth Mottram, a climate scientist at Danish Meteorological Institute, news website CBS reported.Stating that the melt area has been quite big when the warm air mass from Europe arrived in Greenland, Rottram said that the dry summer period is the main cause of the very high ice loss.According to Polar Portal, nearly 60 per cent of the ice sheet went through at least 1 mm of melt at the surface on Wednesday.ce covers 82 per cent of Greenland’s surface, which is the second-largest ice sheet after the Antartic. As per reports, this melting season has caused around 0.5 mm rise in the global sea levels.Last week, Europe experienced threatening heatwave, with cities including London experiencing 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and 109 in Paris, CBS reported.
