Wed July 25, 2012 Massive Ice Melt In Greenland Worries
Scientists Originally published on Wed July 25, 2012 2:53 pm A
pair of NASA satellite images taken just four days apart tells a
potentially worrying story of melting ice in the polar summer.
The first, snapped from orbit on July 8, shows about 40 percent
of the Greenland ice sheet shaded in pink or red to illustrate
probable or confirmed surface melting. The second photo, taken
on July 12, shows nearly the entire land mass — 97 percent —
blotched in a red hue. In a typical year, only about half of the
Greenland ice sheet undergoes this kind of melting before it
later refreezes. But the rapidity and extent of the July change
is what has caught scientists off guard, said Thomas Mote, a
professor at the University of Georgia, who helped confirm the
data from three satellites. "Several of us were looking at the
data with multiple different instruments and we began talking to
each other when we realized we were seeing something quite
unusual," he says. Scient