Dramatic Greenland Ice Sheet Melt This Week Actually Raises Sea Level

Via Rolling Stone/Getty Images: Melting ice this week in Greenland.

As expected, that heat wave in Europe last week moved into Greenland over the past couple of days, which is definitely not a good thing.

Temperatures there are 25 to 30 degrees above normal, with some low elevation places up there in Greenland reaching the 70s. In the middle and peak of the Greenland ice sheet, at an elevation of 10,551 feet,  it managed to get above freezing for 11 hours on Tuesday, which is extremely rare, the Washington Post reports. (In the height of summer, Summit, Greenland's normal high temperatures are just in the low teens, believe it or not.) 

The Greenland melt down this week could well be the worst in recorded history, probably besting the benchmark great melt of 2012. Rolling Stone reported that some melting occured on 87 percent of the Greenland ice sheet on Tuesday, before the peak of the heat wave.  By the way, I know Rolling Stone is primarily a music magazine, but they've gotten into some very good political and climate change reporting in recent years.

Before, say, the 1980s, it was very rare for most of the ice sheet to be melting simultaneously, though of course parts of it would experience some melting on the warmer days of summer. Still, the amount of ice lost on Greenland in the summer was always balanced by accumulations of new snow and ice during the winter.

Not any longer. Unlike ice in the Arctic ocean, which melts like ice cubes in a glass and doesn't affect sea levels, Greenlands meltwater runs off and contributes to global sea level rises.

Says Rolling Stone:  "This week alone, Greenland will lose about 50 billion tons of ice, enough for a permanent rise in global sea levels by about 0.1 mm"

Yes, that's only 0.004 of an inch, so that alone you won't notice. But as glaciers worldwide melt and Greenland continues to shed ice, and Antarctica begins to thaw, too, you can see how 0.0004 of an inch in a week can add up to a lot of sea level rise over the course of several decades.

There's more meltwater coming off of Greenland. The Washington Post said 197 billion tons of ice melted from Greenland and flowed into the ocean during the month of July.  

Of course in Greenland, like everywhere else, the warming won't be consistently this bad, and not every year will have such great melt downs. They're just becoming more frequent. In some years, like 2017 and 2018, Greenland experiences chilly summers, so on those occasions, there is very little net ice loss from the ice sheet, as the Category 6 blog notes.

But studies show that Greenland melts like the one in 2012 happen on average only once in 250 years, the Washington Post says. That another one is occuring now, just seven years later, is worrisome.

This much melt exposes older snow and ice to the sun. The older ice has bits of soot and dirt and such in it, so it's darker. That will draw in more of the sun's heat, and contribute to even more melting. That would happen before the melting season shuts down in the early autumn, or would happen again if this winter's new snow melts and exposes the old ice again.

Big Melt This Week In Greenland Is Bad, But Not (Yet) The End Of The World

Orange areas are spots in Greenland that
experienced melting on Thursday. That's
a very unsually large area for this
early in the season.

This sounds dire: Just on Wednesday, two billion tons of ice melted off of Greenland.

To put it in perspective, though, the two billion tons of ice that melted off of Greenland in one day is certainly very bad news, but it doesn't mean the whole ice sheet will go away in a flash. The vast, vast majority of the ice is still obviously very much there in Greenland.

But still. Forty-five percent of the Greenland ice sheet surface was melting Wednesday, which is pretty much the most anybody has seen this early in the season.  Temperatures were as much as 40 degrees above normal in Greenland, notes the Washington Post.

A very high elevation weather station in Greenland, aptly named Summit, briefly went above freezing this week. Thaws are rare at Summit. The last time it happened was in July, 2012, the Washington Post notes.

Much of the thawed ice that didn't manage to flow into the oceans will refreeze in cooler days ahead, but the initial thawing has weakened some of the ice, making it more prone to melting if it gets warm again later this summer.

Climatologists always worry about Greenland's ice sheet. As it melts off, it flows into the ocean and raises global sea levels. This year, the melt season in Greenland is definitely off to a bad start. It could rival the big melt of 2012, which is the benchmark for Greenland thawing.

Then again, the weather patterns might change and the melting could slow.  The fact that melting started in some corners of Greenland in late April amid record warmth, and the thaw continued off and on through May and the first part of June is ominous.

Arctic sea ice extent is so far at record low levels for this time
of year. This trend might or might not continue, depending upon
weather conditions in July and August. 

The bulk of the summer season thaw in Greenland is in July. Now that there has already been some thawing, much of the freshest, whitest snow atop the ice has gone away.

That leaves relatively dirty ice exposed, which attracts more of the sun's heat than pure white stuff. Which in turns means the risk of faster melting.

This latest melting episode in Greenland seems to be a case of climate change teaming up with a natural weather pattern.

The dreaded negative phase of what is known as the North Atlantic Oscillation is going on at the moment.

That pattern creates warm, sunny high pressure systems to sit over Greenland (and at the same time pushing chilly air southward into the mid-latitudes. This can help make it cool and cloudy here in Vermont. I bet you noticed that during this spring.)

Climate change is probably making what would already have been an odd warm spell in Greenland a little bit warmer.

It's not just Greenland that's been a toasty Arctic spot lately. Arctic sea ice is at its lowest level for mid-June since satellites started monitoring it in 1979, the Washington Post tells us.

Ice loss in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas along Alaska's northern coast is "unprecedented, said Rick Thoman, a Fairbanks-based climatologist.  Since so much water is already exposed, the sun will have a chance to warm the water, which could encourage further record-level ice melting  near the North Pole.

If a lot of ice melts in the Arctic Ocean, that won't raise sea levels like Greenland's melt would.  The melting Arctic Ocean ice is like ice cubes melting in your glass of gin and tonic. The water level won't change. Greenland's melt is like a colander filled with ice held over the glass. The thawing ice would drip into the glass, eventually causing it to overflow.

With or without climate change, Arctic weather is highly variable. There's always a chance the weather in the far north could turn cloudier and cooler for the rest of the summer. That would prevent this year from being another record melt, like 2012 was. We'll just have to wait and see on that one.

While Vermont Stayed Wintry; Parts Of Arctic Incredibly Spring Balmy

Temperatures in northern Alaska are likely to be a whopping
35 to 50 degrees above normal this week. While temperatures
normally hover near 0 this time of year in that region,
readings are likely to get above freezing. 

It was another truly wintry morning around Vermont today. For the second day in a row, it was right around 9 below up in Island Pond. Lake Eden clocked in with 6 below.  Many Vermonters awoke to temperatures in the single digits above zero.

The good news for those who are winter-weary is that this will likely be the last time anyone in Vermont sees subzero temperatures until next November at the earliest.

The snow cover, deep in many areas, will begin to subside, starting today and continuing through the weekend amid thawing temperatures.

Despite the fact we will have a few wintry setbacks, spring is finally asserting itself in Vermont.

Meanwhile, it's been springlike up in parts of the Arctic all month. At least springlike by their standards. In parts of Alaska and northwestern Canada, this March will be far and away the warmest on record.

The ever-reliable Category 6 weather blog at Weather Underground has the rundown on this incredible Arctic "warmth."

Let's start with Utquiagvik, Alaska, formerly known as Barrow in the extreme northern tip of that state. The high temperature there yesterday was 32 degrees and the low, 17, which was almost exactly like the conditions we had here in Vermont on Tuesday. Seemingly not all that impressive.

But remember, this is the northern tip of Alaska. That 32 was record high for the date and Tuesday was 35 degrees warmer than normal in Utqiagvic. (Normal high there yesterday was minus 4, normal low, minus 17.

Utqiagvic is running 16 degrees above normal for March, and they are likely going to have the warmest March on record, and the first March with a mean temperature above zero, given the forecast of continued mild temperatures into early April.

It's not just Utqiagvic. Much of Alaska has been even hotter.  Kotzebue, Alaska, about 300 miles southwest to the former Barrow is having a March that will end more than 20 degrees warmer than average, and a record high. Thaws in Kotzebue are rare and brief in March, but each of the past five days there have gotten above freezing. (Normal high this time of year around Kotzebue is around 10 degrees).

There have been some incredible March record highs in Alaska, the Northwest Territories of Canada and far western Siberia. Sitka, Alaska,  reached 67 degrees this month.  Yohin Lake, Northwest Territories, Canada sits just 400 miles from the Arctic Circle and managed to hit an incredible 71 degrees a week or so back. At the hour it was that warm in Yohin Lake, it was a degree or two cooler than that in Miami, Florida.

Tofino, British Columbia reached 76 degrees, which is a March record and would have been the all-time hottest reading there in April, too.

The odd warmth in Alaska is due largely to an odd and strangely persistent weather pattern that has brought repeated bursts of air from the south to the region. Plus, the Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the planet due to climate change.

Superimpose climate change on an odd, warm weather pattern and you really get some bizarre northern heat.

HOW IT AFFECTS US

If it seems this Arctic warmth is something that is happening too far away to affect many people and doesn't affect you at all, think again.

First of all, the lack of ice in the Bering Sea off western Alaska is having a wide range of effects. Ice usually prevents large storm waves from crashing ashore in western Alaska. With the lack of ice, the waves have been producing coastal flooding and erosion, notes the Anchorage Daily News. 

Nobody can go crabbing, fishing and walrus hunting either.

This weather pattern has certainly affected the United States. The big northward bulge in the jet stream has created a big dip downstream. That means cold air masses have been able to easily move south from Canada. Air that's really warm for the season north of the Arctic Circle is cold for the season by the time it heads south to places like, well, Vermont.

Which helps explain why the weather was basically the same yesterday in Vermont as it was way up in the northern tip of Alaska.

This warm Arctic spring is reason to worry about the extent of Arctic ice, too.

Overall, despite the tiny amounts of ice in the Bering Sea, overall Arctic ice extent did not set any record lows this winter, which is a good thing. The ice extent probably peaked around March 13 and it was tied for the seventh lowest in the past 40 years. Not a terrific thing, but at least the amounts of ice didn't crash this year.

This week, the odd heat has expanded to include almost all of the Arctic. This is almost certainly a temporary thing, but it does start off the melt season awfully fast. If the trend were to continue well into the summer, we'd be a risk of setting a new record for lowest ice extent.

That's just speculation at the moment, anything can happen with the pace of this year's melt. It all depends upon what the weather pattern is like when summer really hits in June, July and August.

But if the Arctic ice continues to diminish, it will help keep making the weather patterns weirder and more extreme in places where we live in the mid-latitudes.

GREENLAND GLACIER GROWS

A good example of how natural cycles are superimposed on a warming climate is at the Jakobshavn glacier in Greenland.

The glacier became something of a poster child for climate change back in 2014, when it rapidly began to lose mass. It stunned people watching the climate, as glaciers like Jakobshavn, when they melt fast, contribute to sea level rise.

Well, guess what? The Jakobshavn glacier is growing again. Adding ice. So, no worries about climate change right?  A Greenland glacier is actually growing!

Not so fast.

In the short term, the fact that Jakobshavn glacier is growing is a very good thing. It's not contributing to sea level rise, and is in fact slowing it by an imperceptible amount.

The glacier stopped shrinking and started expanding again because an ocean current bringing water to the spot where the glacier meets the ocean got much chillier starting around 2016.  The water there is the coldest it's been since the 1980s, as Marshall Shepherd notes in Forbes.

There's a natural pattern called the North Atlantic Oscillation that makes the North Atlantic flip between cold and warm once every five, ten, fifteen, twenty years - it depends.

It's in the cold phase, so that's helping the glacier grow. Which leads Shepherd to a great point in his Forbes article.  People who deny or are skeptical of climate change often say the climate changes naturally.

Climate scientist would respond by saying, Duh!  They all already know climate changes naturally. always changes.  As Shepherd writes:

"It's not 'either/or' with naturally-varying climate and human influences. it's 'and.''

Which is what we're seeing now with the Jakobshavn glacier, and the odd heat in Alaska.

Chances are, when the North Atlantic Oscillation flips again, that Jakobshavn glacier will begin to thaw again.

Believe It Or Not, A Dust Storm In Greenland

Satellite view of a dust storm in Greenland of all places. Yep, they
can happen there and it's NOT global warming

We all think of Greenland as an incredible cold, forbidding place. It's basically an enormous pile of ice.

But as the Weather Channel points out, you can actually get dust storms up there. A satellite passing overhead recently took a photo of one.

These dust storms aren't anything huge like you see in the Desert Southwest or near the Sahara Desert or something like that. But they do get cranking up in Greenland.

They get going close to the coast, where snow and ice usually melt away during the summer.

Here's how it all happens:

Water from melting glaciers flows into a flood plain, then either recedes or evaporates. The sediment left behind consists of a very fine powder called glacial flour, which is created by the grinding of glaciers and pulverizing rock.

When the glacial flour dries out, strong winds can send it airborne, creating these far northern dust storms.

Unlike seemingly everything else that goes on in Greenland, which seems to be the go-to bellwether for climate change, the dust storms have nothing to do with global warming.

These little Greenland dust storms have been reported over many decades. Satellite photos rarely capture them because it's usually too cloudy to see them. This time, the skies cleared and the satellite got a nice shot of this dust storm.

Sea Level Rise Might Be Worse Than We Thought

Water from melting flows off the Greenland
Ice Sheet. Recent research suggests ice
sheet melting in Greenland and
Antarctica might be worse than first thought. 

The science shifts a little from time to time as to how bad sea level rise is going to get with global warming. The latest study is mostly bad news on this front.

The latest salvo in this discussion is a new study that says melting ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland are now speeding up the process.

Global warming causes sea levels to rise in two ways: Warmer water expands. When the water heats up, it gets "bigger" meaning it has nowhere to go but up.

The other way sea levels rise is more obvious: Land based ice sheets melt, and the meltwater eventually makes its way to the oceans. Hence, higher water.

The latest research says the pace of sea level rise has picked up over the past 25 years mostly because of the melting ice sheets.

According to The Weather Channel:

"Of the 3 inches of sea level rise in the past quarter century, about 55 percent is from warmer water expanding, and the rest is from leting ice. But the process is accelerating, and more than three quarters of that acceleration since 1993 is due to melting ice sheets in Greenland an Antartica, the study shows."

The bottom line is that by the year 2100, sea levels could rise by two feet, instead of the one foot projections we've commonly heard are due by the end of the century.

One big wild card in all this is probably Antarctica. Will big parts of it keep melting faster and faster? Or will increased snowfall over that continent at the bottom of the Earth offset some of the melt. It tends to snow more when it's warmer, as long as it's not above freezing. A warmer Antarctic climate could increase snowfall. On top of that, some sort of natural cycle has increased snowfall in Antarctica over the past 10,000 years.

A NASA study, using satellite analysis, says the Antarctic ice sheet showed a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice per year from 1992 to 2001. That rate slowed to 82 billion tons of ice per year between 2003 and 2008.

It's possible this net gain trend will reverse itself in coming decades. Plus, everybody knows that parts of Antarctica are indeed showing a melting trend. And other research, including the new work I described above, contradicts the NASA findings.

As you can see, scientists really need to continue figuring out Antarctica and how it relates to climate change.

Meanwhile, things are worse in some areas than others. Changing sea currents and sinking land in some parts of the U.S. East Coast are making things worse. After sinking land amid rising sea levels can never be a good thing.

The combined land sinking and sea level rise means that the sea level in the past 100 years has shown a net gain of 11 inches in New York and Boston, 16 inches in Atlantic City, 18 inches in Norfolk, Virginia and 25 inches in Galveston, Texas.

While some of the research is still a little murky, one thing is clear: It's only going to get worse.

Wildfires In Greenland? Yeah, Weird, But Not As Weird As You'd Think

Believe it or not, there have always beem a few wildfires
in Greenland, but this year's spate of fires up
there appears to be a doozy.

August is one principal month in Earth's Northern Hemisphere when you'd expect wildfires.

The summer sun has been beating down on this half of the world, and some forests in Asia, North America and Europe have burst into flames.  

(The problem is especially bad in British Columbia, Canada this year.)

Wildfires have also broken out this summer in a place you wouldn't expect: Greenland.

Yes, Greenland. 

Greenland is mostly covered by an immense ice cap, so you'd think wildfires wouldn't be a problem up there.

But low lying coastal areas are outside of the ice cap, and summer does hit up there.

True, it's not exactly 90 degree beach weather in coastal Greenland, and there's certainly no tinder dry forests anywhere up there, but the snow and ice does briefly disappear along Greenland's shorelines in the summer.

Wildfires can burn through the grasslands, stunted willows, peat and other low vegetation in Greenland, and that's what's going on now. And they do sometimes occur in "summer" weather in coastal Greenland, when temperatures "soar" into the lower 50s.

Kind of like grassfire season here in Vermont during April.

Past history of wildfires in Greenland is vague, but we know they've always occured there. But some evidence suggests that this summer's wildfires are worse than usual. Perhaps worse than ever, but we don't know that for sure.

Satellite data, cited by Scientific American, suggest that this year's wildfires in Greenland are far above what has been experienced in recent years and decades. This does suggest climate change could be playing a role, but we have no proof of that. At least not yet.

Wildfires are almost always bad, and Greenland's are no exception. But there's a unique reason why Greenland wildfires are bad.

Soot from the wildfires can deposit soot on parts of Greeland's vast ice sheet if the wind is right.

If the ice is very clean, it tends to deflect the sun's heat away, and summer melting is slower.

If you add soot or other dark debris and deposit it on the ice, it will draw the sun's heat onto the ice, accelerating melting.

You don't want Greenland's ice to melt, because the added water can raise global sea levels.

On the bright side, an odd weather pattern brought unusual snow and cold to parts of the Greenland ice cap earlier this summer, so overall melting there has not been insanely above normal.

As of early July, the melt season in Greenland was the slowest since 2009, although it's pretty fast by historical standards.

I'm not sure where the 2017 Greenland melt season will end up, but it's aways good to hope the melting stayed slow throughout this summer, despite the odd wildfires.

Greenland Heats Up Again, So Do Global Temperatures

Areas in red show where ice was
melting in Greenland on June 10.
That's an unusually big area
of Greenland to see ice melt,
especially so early in the summer.  

Seems like every time I turn around, there's more heat news to report from the Arctic.

This time, it's Greenland again. The community of Nuuk, on Greenland's southwest coast, reached 76 degrees last Friday, the hottest temperature on record for Greenland in June. That broke the previous record high of 75 set just the day before. 

True, the southwest coast of Greenland is normally the warmest part of the mostly ice-capped large island, but still, this was something.

Warmth extended well inland, so, ominously, the seasonal melting of the Greenland ice cap, which already got off to an early start, is more intense than usual, at least for now.

Greenland melting is worse than the ice melting in the Arctic ocean. Greenland's ice is on a land surface, so if more than the usual amount melts in the summer, that contributes to sea level rises.

If the ice is already floating in the ocean, by contrast, sea levels wouldn't really rise if that ice melts.

Still, melting sea ice is bad because it increases the amount of solar heat that goes into the Arctic Ocean, which in turn could help make Greenland warmer and encourage even more melting.

The increasing amounts of ice loss in the Arctic Ocean could also be influencing the arrangement of the jet stream, causing something known as the Arctic amplification.

This would also increase temperatures in Greenland, causing more melting, notes the Christian Science Monitor.

Says the Monitor:

"If loss of sea ice is driving changes in the jet stream, the jet stream is changing Greenland, and this, in turn, has an inpact on the Arctic systm as well as the climate. It's a system. It is strongly interconnected and we have to approach it as such," Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory professor and lead study author Marco Todesco said in a Columbia University release."

Meanwhile, yesterday, NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information, their monthly global analysis, said May, 2016 was Earth's hottest May on record.

If that statement sounds like a broken record, it should. Incredibly, each of the past 13 months have now been record hottest.

The effects of the world-warming El Nino are fading, now that the periodic warming of the eastern Pacific Ocean is kaput.

May wasn't as far above normal temperature wise around the world as recent months, which might reflect a bit of a "cooling" trend because of El Nino's waning influence.

Still, 2016 looks to be a shoo-in for the hottest year on record for Earth, which would beat the previous record set in 2015. But 2017 will probably be a bit cooler, because El Nino is gone.

We shouldn't take much comfort in that. El Nino explains only part of the wildly warm 13 months we just had. Global warming explains the rest. And that's not going away. It will keep intensifying.

So 2017 will surely be warmer for the Earth than it has in the past, and it will probably be only a few years before the record for hottest year will be eclipsed yet again.

Arctic Heat And Melting Ice Just Keep Getting Worse And Worse

Click on this chart to make it bigger and easier
to see. The black line is the trend in
Arctic sea ic this year. The red line represents
the record low year of 2012. The gray shading
is pretty much the longterm average 

It seems every time we glimpse up toward the Arctic this year, things just keep getting more and more dire.

The ice is melting faster and earlier than ever before as the increasing warmth of spring grinds on. Temperatures are staying way above normal and are forecast to continue doing so.

Worse, strong, warm high pressure is parked over parts of the high Arctic, which means lots of toasty sunshine to accelerate ice melt.

I know what you're thinking. Who cares about a balmy Arctic spring?

My reply is the same as I've offered before. A warm, melting Arctic can screw up your life. Yes, the life you lead thousands of miles south of the Arctic.

First of all, the less ice there is, the less heat gets reflected back to space. Less ice means the oceans and earth can absorb more heat, worsening global warming.

This is known as positive feedback. Global warming melts ice. The lack of ice makes global warming worse. That melts even more ice. And so on and so on.

The Arctic melt also screws up coastal cities over the long term. The ice melting in the Arctic Ocean isn't that big a deal when thinking of sea level rise. It's like an ice cube melting in a glass. The glass won't overflow when the ice melts.

However, the ice melting off Greenland IS a big deal. That is like a melting ice cube held above the glass of water. Eventually the dripping of water from the melting ice cube into the glass will make that glass overflow.

Water flowing off Greenland from the excessive melts are slowly making the world's oceans "overflow"

On top of that, the jet stream depends largely on a sharp temperature contrast between the equatorial regions and the poles. The jet stream controls the strength, position and movement of most storms and areas of fair weather high pressure - the weather in general.

The Arctic is warming up much more rapidly than places near the Equator. That means there's less of a temperature contrast. Which could mean a weaker or weirder jet stream. Whichwould make weather systems or patterns get "stuck" in place more often.

That, in turn, would lead to longer and more intense heat waves, droughts, floods or even cold waves, depending on where and how the jet stream gets "stuck."

So yeah, worry about a warming Arctic.

Here are some recent details of what's going on up there:

ARCTIC HEAT WAVES

Researchers with NOAA said Barrow, on Alaska's northern tip, had by far its earliest date at which the snow cover melted away in the spring.

The snow was gone at Barrow by May 13, a full 10 days earlier than the previous record.

Meanwhile, the town of Longyearbyen, in the northern tip of Norway - the northernmost civilian community in the world, has had only one cooler than average day so far this year, which is unheard of, notes Bob Henson in a recent Weather Underground post. 

Also, as I noted previously, parts of Greenland in April had its earliest thaw on record. Ominously, there have been more thaws since. We'll see if Greenland has a hot (for them) summer. It would be bad if they did.

(See sea level rise, above)

NO ICE, ICE, BABY

Arctic sea ice is still melting at a record fast pace this spring, as Bob Henson notes in his Weather Underground blog.

The melt is so far going at a far faster pace than the record 2012 melt.

Satellite pictures are showing major cracks and openings in Arctic ice. These cracks, called leads, always happen later during the summer in the Arctic, but never in May.;

Until this year.

"It looks like late June or early July right now," says David Douglas, a research biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey

Scientists are marveling - not in a good way -- about the melting ice.

"We're in record breaking territory no matter how you look at it," Jennifer Francis told the Washington Post recently.

Francis, an Arctic specialist at Rutgers University, studies how changes in the Arctic affect weather patterns in the mid-latitudes were most of us live.

"The ice is really low, the temperatures are really high, the fire seasons have started early," Francis said.

Wildlife such as polar bears and walruses are suffering, too. They need ice to hunt for food, and it's literally disappearing under their feet.

Though things are off to an ominous start, there's no guarantee this year will break a record for least Arctic ice. If it's relatively cloudy in the Arctic during June and July, and if air and ocean circulation patterns assist in pushing ice toward somewhat lower latitudes,  the Arctic sea ice melt might slow down dramatically, as Henson notes. 

WILDFIRES:

Remember that big wildfire in Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada at the beginning of this month?

Well, it's still burning, big time, with no signs of containment. Most of the fire has moved away from Fort McMurray, but it now covers an area bigger than Rhode Island and is moving into neighboring provinces.  

The fire probably won't go out until the snow flies in the autumn.

Global warming might have contributed tot he giant
Fort McMurray fire in Canada. The fire, in turn, might
help make global warming a little worse.  

This is bad for a lot of reasons, besides the fact that a bunch of trees just went up in smoke and more are going every day.

We've seen smoke from this fire a couple times this month now all the way down here in Vermont. It makes the sky hazy,

That's soot. It's not great for the lungs. But worse, the wind sometimes blows the soot over and onto the Arctic Ocean and onto the Greenland ice cap.

The soot particles are dark, and when they settle on ice, the dark soot attracts the sun's heat, accelerating melting. If the ice had stayed white, a lot of the sun's heat would have been reflected back into space, so the melting would be slower.

Also, the Fort McMurray fire is burning through boreal forests that have permafrost under the soil's surface.

Normally, the forests and vegetation shade the permafrost, so it stays, well, frosty.  The fires get rid of that protective vegetation and leave charred black stuff in its wake.

That means the sun can get down and melt the permafrost. When that happens, tons of carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas, gets released into the air, worsening global warming.

More positive feedback, like that ice melting in the Arctic Ocean.

So yeah, I hope the few people that live in the Arctic regions are enjoying their warm year. They're probably not. They're worried instead.

We down here in the "South" should be worried, too.

Odd Greenland Heat Wave Breaks April Records, Worries Scientists

A freak weather pattern caused this unprecedented
melting in Greenland in 2012. Are we setting up
for more extreme melting this year? We'll find out,
but a bit of melting has already started two
months earlier than normal.  

That cold wave we had here in Vermont in early April is fast fading from memory (we hope!), especially after the gorgeous 70 degree weather Sunday.

But during our nasty April cold spell a couple weeks back,  a corresponding, unprecedented heat wave in Greenland won't be forgotten by climate scientists soon.

That's because these scientists are downright scared by what happened.

A few places in southern, coastal Greenland do get above freezing fairly often in April. But most of the frozen ice capped island stays well below freezing into late May or June. Some places in the middle, high elevation part of Greenland rarely get above freezing at all.

The heat in Greenland last week was something else, though.

About 12 percent of Greenland's ice sheet had some melting during this early heat wave. That doesn't sound like much, but in April, none of it melts. Until now.

Thule, on Greenland's northwest coast, experienced southerly winds gusting to 75 mph which brought temperatures that hit 34 degrees. That's more than 30 degrees above normal for this time of year.

Nuuk, Greenland hit 46 degrees and a spot on the southwestern coast of the island spiked up to 61 degrees, compared to an average high of 25 degrees there this time of year.

There's a spot in the middle of Greenland that hit 21 degrees above zero. Below freezing, yes, but still 41 degrees above normal.

That's the equivalent of it hitting 96 degrees here in northern Vermont in the middle of April. And that 21 degrees is roughly 10 degrees warmer than the average high temperature for what passes for normal summer "heat" in the middle of July up there.

The reason why scientists care about this Greenland heat wave, and why you should to, is it started the summer melt season in Greenland two months ahead of schedule.

Ice has been melting off the Greenland ice fields with increasing vigor over the past several decades, under the influence of global warming.

The more ice melts off Greenland, the more sea levels globally could rise.

The early April heat in Greenland does not guarantee that the summer melt season will be much worse than normal up there. It could stay colder than normal there this summer for all I know.

But signs are not pointing toward such a cool summer.

I brought up the cold New England weather in early April and the Greenland heat together at the top of this post for a reason. There was a relationship between the two events.

You might remember in previous posts that I brought up the weird jet stream gyrations that seem to be bringing more extreme weather events to different parts of the world, including here in the Good Ole USA, including Vermont.

The jet stream during early April was consistent with what scientists have been saying would probably happen with increasing frequency.

The upper level air flow plunged from far northern Canada all the way down to New England.

Then it recurved north, far much north than usual, taking warm air fro the subtropic Atlantic and delivering it to Greenland. Normally the jet stream wouldn't bulge as far north as Greenland to bring that much warm air, but this time it did.

As climate and environmental blogger Robert Scribner wrote:

"An extraordinary polar amplification of this kind -- one that includes Equator-to-Pole heat transfers -- risks hitting or increasing the intensity of a number of harmful climate tipping points. These include the amplifiying feedbacks of increasing rates of sea ice melt and Arctic carbon store response. 

In addition, extreme warmth over Greenland risks further glacial destabilizaion, increasing rates of se level rise and increasing weather instability in the North Atlantic."

In other words, weird jet stream gyriations like this one would set off more melting, which would make these weird jet stream twists and turns even more extreme, and worse for us.

Of course, not every climate scientist and watcher paints as dire a picture as Scribner. But most are worried about events like the April Greenland heat wave. Mostly because these Arctic heat waves have been happening more and more frequently.

And another early season Greenland hot spell might be in the offing.

A weather pattern similar to the one in early April seems to be setting up for this coming weekend.

The core of the coldest air in North America this weekend will stay well up into central and northern Quebec and Ontario. It's going to turn chilly in New England Saturday and Sunday,  but it won't be extreme like early in the month. Colder than normal, yes, but not something utterly weird.

But another surge of extremely warm air with this pattern wants to make a beeline toward Greenland. That could cause a little more unwelcome ice melt.

Greenland's "Dark Ice" This Summer Is Ominous

Dark colored ice in Greenland crisscrossed with
crevices. Melt water goes into the crevices
and can accelerate deterioration of the ice sheet.
Photo by Jason Box.  

If you've ever stepped outside into the winter sunshine after a snowstorm you know how blindingly bright it is out there.

The white snow reflects light, so it's glaring. The white snow reflects heat from the sun, too, and that helps keep things cold in the middle of January.

Greenland is a big ice sheet. Almost all of it is covered in thick, thick, thick ice all year.

That ice, although never pristinely white in the summer, reflects away the summer sun's heat, rather than absorbing it because the ice is very light colored.

At least it was. The ice sheet has been getting dirtier and darker in recent years and decades, and according to Eric Holthaus in Slate, this year the Greenland ice sheet is the darkest color it's ever been. Pictures of the ice sheet look like it's a giant version of a rotting snowbank at the last gasp of winter.

Dark, light, who cares? Well, YOU should. And everybody else, too. The dark ice in Greenland absorbs the sun's heat, a lot like a blacktop is a lot hotter in the summer than a patio painted white.

That means the ice up there was melting a lot faster than usual over this summer.  Fast melting is bad in Greenland. Unlike the Arctic Ocean, it's not floating ice. If ice floating on the ocean melts, the sea level won't rise, just like if the ice in your glass of gin and tonic melts. The glass won't get any fuller.

But if Greenland's ice melts, it runs off into the ocean, and contributes to sea level rise, perhaps the biggest threat from global warming. Since so much of the world's population lives in big cities on the coasts, it'll be tricky when the sea levels rise and flooding gets worse and worse.

Dark ice and a big crevice in Greenland
this past summer. Photo by Jason Box.  n

Do you move entire cities? Build multi-billion dollar sea walls and hope for the best? There's really no good options.

Already, American cities like Miami, Fla. and Norfolk, Va. are seeing the effects, and it might no be long before places like New York, Washington and Boston start to go under.

You want to keep Greenland's ice sheets bright and white, to slow the melting a bit.

A white Greenland won't solve the problem of rising sea levels, but anything to slow the process down helps.

Now what, though?  As I said, Greenland's ice was dark and yucky over the summer. There's a lot of theories why. The boreal forests of the Arctic way up north in Canada, Alaska and Siberia had more forest fires than ever before this summer, and in recent summers. 

(The Arctic is warming up, the snow is melting sooner the summers are hotter, so forest fires, in general are becoming more likely, and bigger. Arctic forest fires are burning at roughly twice the rate they were about a decade ago.)

Some of the soot from this year's northern forest fires landed on the Greenland ice sheet, so that helped make it darker.

You also get summer snowstorms in parts of Greenland to freshen up the ice and snow cover, and that didn't happen as much as usual this year. The dark stuff might also be partly composed of pollution and dust from places like here, and China, and God knows where else in the Northern Hemisphere. Maybe microbes are contributing.

A scientist named Jason Box is the main source for Slate's material on Dark Greenland. He's pretty strident in his public alarm over global warming. He's the guy who found himself in a bit of controversy in July when he Tweeted: "If even a small fraction of Arctic sea floor carbon is released to the atmosphere, we're f'd." 

So OK, Jason Box is blunt, and he probably pisses off people who aren't particularly concerned about global warming.  But from everything I read, his science is totally sound, so he's got cred.

It's not clear how to fix this, other than cooling the Earth, so we don't have so many Arctic forest fires, so Arctic summers are not hot, which would limit melting.