It's far more exciting
to be reporting
on a "crisis"
than on everyday life.
Even in the "good old days",
the mass media would
sometimes misinform us.
U.S. journalists who travelled
to the U.S.S.R. in the 1950s,
for example, lied about
what they saw.
Last summer
Scientific American
was complaining about
Greenland’s "lost summer",
when snow and ice persisted
well into summer on
Greenland’s east coast,
causing big problems
for sea birds trying to breed:
When the exaggeration
is cleared away, we're left
with ordinary Greenland
weather fluctuations.
Last year scaremongering
was about too much ice
-- this year, too little ice:
Danish climatologist Steffen Olsen
took the picture above on June 13, 2019
while on a routine mission through
the Inglefield Gulf, in northwest Greenland.
A team of climatologists
were retrieving weather station
equipment from the area.
The thin layer of water was on top
of an ice sheet about 1.2 meters deep,
Dr Olsen said.
“We know the ice is around 1.2m thick
and that we have about 870m [of] water
below us."
Dr Olsen’s colleague Ruth Mottram,
an expert on Greenland’s ice sheet,
told The Independent unusually warm
temperatures, combined with very
few cracks in the ice, meant
meltwater was unable to drain
through the solid sheet of ice.
When Mr Olsen
took the photograph,
the country was losing
more than two gigatons
( equal to two billion tons )
of ice on that day alone.
No one mentioned similar
losses in the past, such as
June 2012.
The "dog" photo above
actually has nothing to do
with Greenland’s ice sheet.
It a photo of fjord ice,
which freezes every winter
and melts every summer.
This year it's beginning
to melt slightly earlier
than usual, because of
warm air moving up
from the south.
A temperature peak
of 17.3C for Qaanaaq,
is well below
the 20.0 C. record.
At nearby Thule,
on June 29, 1959,
the temperature
hit 17.2C.
Temperature data
began in 1951.
It's likely that Thule
temperatures were higher
in the 1930s and 40s:
Two billion tons
of ice melting
in one day,
alarms people.
In summer, daily losses
are typically four Gt,
and can peak
at eight Gt. per day.
Over the three summer months,
the ice sheet normally loses
about 200 Gt., an average of
slightly over two Gt. per day.
