GREENLAND MELT-SEASON ENDS

Greenland tends to accumulate more snow than it melts for ten months every year, from September through June. Only in July and August does there tend to be more melting than accumulating. (Not that there can’t be summer snows or winter thaws, but such events are brief and usually don’t alter the typical trend.) Only during the record-setting melt of 2012 did the thawing begin in early June. (Red line in graph to lower right, below.) Even in 2012 the “year” (Sept 1 to August 31) wound up with 40 more gigatons than it started with. On a more average year 380 gigatons accumulate, and last year (2022-2023) roughly 400 gigatons accumulated, and the year before (2021-2022 roughly 500 gigatons accumulated.

A this point it is important to visualize how big a gigaton is. A gigaton is a billion metric tons, and a metric ton is 2200 pounds. So, on your bathroom scale, a gigaton would weigh 2,200,000,000,000 pounds. Another way to visualize it is to picture a massive iceberg 2 miles long, half a mile wide, and 1100 feet tall. (With 9/10th under water, such a berg would still rise 110 feet above the waves.)

Imagine 400 such icebergs. That is how much snow has accumulated atop Greenland since a year ago, on September 1, 2022. So why are we worried about Greenland melting away? (Not that I am really worried, or that you are really worried, but we are suppose to be worried.)

Well, besides the snow falling on top of Greenland there is ice slowly flowing off of Greenland in the form of glaciers, and to achieve a “balance” (or equilibrium), glaciers must calve 400 gigatons of ice into the sea.

It is not all that easy to measure the weight of all the icebergs calving off Greenland, and the situation is exacerbated by the tendency of the press to become wild and to sensationalize the calving of glaciers, which makes glaciers shorter, and also to sensationalize the times the glaciers extend and do not calve, which makes them longer.

For example, in 2011 a fracture formed on Petersmann Glacier and roughly a gigaton of ice broke free, which was seen as a sign of global warming.

The loss of this ice is clearly seen by comparing a satellite picture from 2011 with 2012, however when we look at a current picture we see the ice has regrown past even the length it was at in 2011. (Hat tip: Tony Heller at Real Climate Science)

Oddly, the press now reports that the advance of the glacier is also a proof of Global Warming. Apparently the ice has advanced due to “more rapid melting”, or so they say. When pressed to give evidence of such melt, or evidence the glacier has sped up, or evidence the ice is not “grounded” on bedrock but now thinner and “afloat”, one discovers the press doesn’t like being pressed. They hand the ball off to a man in a white coat who self-identifies as a scientist, and who says it is so because he theorizes it is so, but also is unable to give evidence. Hmm. Could it be we are not dealing with true, scientific inquiry, but with a political narrative based around milking a cash cow?

Far be it from me to accuse anyone. I’m merely inquiring.

One fascinating difficulty the true scientists are wrestling with is the fact the continental crust beneath such massive glaciers is very plastic, and undergoes isostatic repression when weight increases and isostatic rebound when weight diminishes. Some of these responses are slow, but some are surprisingly nimble.

For example, the weight of massive glaciers may have depressed the rock bottom of Hudson Bay a half mile, and the subsequent recovery continues to this day in a manner that can be measured by a GPS, thousands of years after the ice melted. However using the same GPS, the retreat or advance of a glacier can be seen to have an immediate effect on the rock it flows over and beside.

This throws a wrench into the workings of calculating the mass of the ice upon Greenland. If the continent below is depressed a foot by the weight of the ice above, and the surface of the ice only lowers six inches, then the ice is actually six inches thicker though its surface is six inches lower. You can imagine how this complicates measurements, especially when the bottom of buried valleys lower as the sides grow, (a geological phenomenon which created amazingly steep-walled fjords in Norway.)

All we can be certain of is that what the snowfall totals show us. 2012 was an aberration. It has been far more common to see above average accumulation and below average melt over Greenland, during recent years, and the year that just ended was no exception.

To me this neither suggests warming nor suggests cooling. It suggests increased moisture. However to discuss the topic in such a sane and logical manner seems quite above the IQ of those whose intellects have been dwindled by greed to a single-minded focus upon squatting down to milk a cash cow.