Rain Is Triggering More Melting on the Greenland Ice Sheet — in Winter

"Pulses of melting linked to rainfall doubled in summer and tripled in winter, a new climate change study found. That's a problem for sea level rise."

"When a frozen snowflake falls on the Greenland Ice Sheet, it lands with a whisper and stays frozen, sometimes for months.

But raindrops splat down, making little craters and melting some of the adjacent snow crystals. Multiplied across thousands of square miles, they can trigger widespread melting and runoff, which can lead to more sea level rise.

A new analysis of satellite and weather data shows that melting associated with rain in Greenland doubled in the summers and tripled in the winters from 1988 to 2012 as temperatures rose , scientists write in a study published Thursday in The Cryosphere, a journal of the European Geosciences Union."

Bob Berwyn reports for InsideClimate News March 8, 2019.

 

Source: InsideClimate News, 03/11/2019