TNI Bureau: A titanic sheet of ice across Greenland has melted at an unusually fast rate in the course of this month – NASA has revealed and released satellite images showing the melting. Scientists have described this rare event to be a rarest one which occurs about once every 150 years. As per records it last happened in 1889.
Amazingly, this time even the coldest place of Greenland like Summit station, showed melting. The melting, which has been tagged as ‘unprecedented’ by NASA showed that it took place over four days beginning July 8. The unusual event was that the melting occurred over a widespread area.
NASA says the melting area went from 40 per cent of the ice sheet to 97 per cent which is a new record. Until now, the most extensive melt seen by satellites in the past 30 years was about 55 per cent.
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Though about half of Greenland’s ice sheet normally melts over the summer months, the speed and scale of this year’s melting shocked the scientists, who described the phenomenon as “extraordinary”.
NASA also informed that almost the entire ice cover of Greenland, from its thin, low-lying coastal edges to its centre, which is 3km thick, experienced some degree of melting at its surface.
Just two days before, NASA revealed images had shown that a massive iceberg, twice the size of Manhattan, had broken off a glacier in Greenland.
So far Scientists have not said if the melting is from global warming or natural, but the top scientists have opined that it will remain as a great scientific phenomenon for them to decide about the reasons of this extraordinary natural event.