NASA reports ‘unprecedented’ ice melt

Scientists say the melting covers a larger area than what has been detected in three decades of satellite observation.

“When we see melt in places that we haven’t seen before, at least in a long period of time, it makes you sit up and ask what’s happening,” said NASA chief scientist Waleed Abdalati.

“It’s a big signal, the meaning of which we’re going to sort out for years to come.”

Scientists have described the phenomenon as “extraordinary,” after studies showed that the melted area jumped from 40 percent of the ice sheet to 97 percent in just four days from July 8.

Ice sheets also melted at Summit station, Greenland’s coldest and highest place.

“Ice cores from Summit show that melting events of this type occur about once every 150 years on average,” said Lora Koenig, a glaciologist from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

“With the last one happening in 1889, this event is right on time, but if we continue to observe melting events like this in upcoming years, it will be worrisome.”

NASA satellite imagery recently revealed that a massive iceberg, twice the size of Manhattan, had broken off the Petermann Glacier in Greenland.

“The observation [from Greenland] is in my view much more important than the recently reported break up of a large iceberg from Petermann Glacier,” Dr. Poul Christoffersen of the Scott Polar Institute in Cambridge told the state-funded BBC.

Scientists believe much of Greenland’s ice is already freezing again.

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