Here's a public service announcement: Coronavirus is not the only problem that humans are facing today; Greenland is also heating up at a faster rate than before. This means that climate change is still knocking Mother Nature on a very rapid process compared to before. Based on research, Greenland had just lost ice amounting to 600 billion tons within just two months from 2019. Here's why it is dangerous.
Greenland needs your help! It lost 600 billion tons of ice in 2019!
To top off all the things that are now happening in the world, such as Coronavirus spread or asteroids coming towards Earth, another environmental crisis that humanity is dealing with is the famous "ice island" or Greenland.
According to a research published in Geophysical Exploration Letters and National Aeronautics and Space Administration or NASA, Greenland which located in the North Atlantic Ocean is now seeking everyone's help as the island reportedly lost 600 billion tons of ice in a two-month season in 2019 which caused the global sea to increase levels by nearly a tenth of an inch or 2.2 millimeters.
As explained by the scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of California, Irvine, the past summer of 2019, resulted in the massive loss of ice in Greenland. Though it is normal for the island to lose its cold temperature since it was summer back then, the amount of ice that Greenland lost in the season was not normal, as mentioned by the experts.
"We knew this past summer had been particularly warm in Greenland, melting every corner of the ice sheet," said lead author Isabella Velicogna, senior project scientist at JPL and a professor at UCI. "But the numbers really are enormous."
Imagine how huge this problem was--the melted ice in Greenland from years 2002 up to 2019 was doubled in the last year's melted ice, taking 17 years of Greenland's life as an ice island.
Greenland is not the only one; Antarctica also shows melting ice
Just like what's happening in Greenland, Antarctica-- the world's coldest southernmost continent-- is also facing the same problem. Still, it is not yet at its alarming rate since the Eastern part of the continent showed a massive gain from the past.
"In Antarctica, the mass loss in the west proceeds unabated, which will lead to an even further increase in sea-level rise," Velicogna said. "But we also observe a mass gain in the Atlantic sector of East Antarctica caused by an uptick in snowfall, which helps mitigate the enormous increase in a mass loss that we have seen in the last two decades on other parts of the continent."
For now, experts are still studying whether these alarming rates may cause harm to humans sooner than we can ever imagine.
