Greenland faces ice melt disaster

AKIPRESS.COM - Extreme heat bowled over Europe last week, smashing records in its wake. Now, the heatwave that started in the Sahara has rolled into Greenland -- where more records are expected to crumble in the coming days, CNN reports.
That means the heatwave is now Greenland's problem, right? Not quite. When records fall in Greenland, it's everyone's problem.
Greenland is home to the world's second-largest ice sheet. And when it melts significantly -- as it is expected to do this year -- there are knock-on effects for sea levels and weather across the globe.
Greenland's ice sheet usually melts during the summer. This year, it started melting earlier, in May, and this week's heatwave is expected to accelerate the melt.
The country's mammoth ice sheet rises 3,000 meters above sea level. Forecasters predict that its summit will be particularly warm this week, at just below zero degrees. "It's a very warm temperature for that altitude," said Ruth Mottram, climate scientist at the Danish Meteorological Institute.
Now 2019 could come close to the record-setting year of 2012, said Jason Box, professor and ice climatologist at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland. During that "melty year," he said, Greenland's ice sheet lost 450 million metric tons -- the equivalent of more than 14,000 tons of ice lost per second.