At a young age, I have learned from my mother that when packing groceries, you pack the cold items with each other so that they can stay as cold as possible for as long as possible. We did this – and still do it – as a way to keep things from melting. And so, due to this practice, I came to a very clear realization that melting is bad. Whether it’s a small container of ice cream, or something slightly more significant, like the Greenland Ice Sheets, I know it’s bad (with the Ice Sheets being worse).
This melting Ice Sheet covers about 80% of Greenland and is a relatively large store of fresh water. This ice is melting at an increasing rate that may result in your grandchildren – maybe even your children – having to kayak across Greenland rather than walk.
Jason Box, a professor at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, says that even if the climate does not increase any more, “Greenland is going away.” With the extremely fast melting rate, it’s hard to imagine that the ice sheet can be fixed. At one of Box’s weather stations, the equipment shows how intense the melting process is. Just 5 years ago, the equipment’s hose was buried 30 ft. in the ice. Now, it lays flat on the surface, no longer frozen in place.
Furthermore, this past summer, the conditions in Greenland were so warm and dry that the temperatures reached an average of 2 degrees Celsius higher than the ordinary summer. This high temperature melted the ice so much, to the extent that a dark, older, interior ice has been revealed. The total sum of melted ice in Greenland throughout June, July, and August of 2016 amounts to 36 million square kilometers. Though some may say that this is average for the past decade, it is still significantly higher than the amounts of ice that typically melt compared to the last 100 years. When comparing 1979 to 2006 (just 27 years) the summer melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet has increase by 30 percent.
The melting of this ice is such a real and proven problem, it is a shock that there has not been much initiative taken to fix anything. This is likely because it is hard to accept the facts. Even though the damage has not necessarily come from us, it is imperative that we acknowledge the evidence that we have and do something with it.
It will always be easier to ignore intimidating issues such as climate change, make claims that it is a hoax, or even choose to think that it is completely natural for an ancient body of ice to be melting, but it will also always be easier to walk, bike, or drive across Greenland rather than swim.
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