Greenland

NASA has a number of whiteboard animations called Earth Minute Videos: NASA isn’t all about interplanetary exploration; in fact, the agency spends much of its time studying our home planet. This fun whiteboard animation series explains Earth science to the science-curious. The videos themselves don’t have much math but each …

From NASA’s Vital Signs of the Planet feature Greenland’s Retreating Glaciers Could Impact Local Ecology (10/27/2020): A new study of Greenland’s shrinking ice sheet reveals that many of the island’s glaciers are not only retreating, but are also undergoing other physical changes. Some of those changes are causing the rerouting …

The picture here is a snapshot from an animation by NASA in the article Visualizing the Quantities of Climate Change – Ice Sheet Loss in Greenland and Antarctica by Matt Conlen (3/9/2020) that shows a gigatonne of ice. A gigatonne isn’t much since Satellite data show that Greenland and Antarctica …

From NASA’s Greenland’s Rapid Melt Will Mean More Flooging (12/10/2019): Increasing rates of global warming have accelerated Greenland’s ice mass loss from 25 billion tons per year in the 1990s to a current average of 234 billion tons per year. This means that Greenland’s ice is melting on average seven times …

The NSIDC has a Greenland Surface Melt Extent Interactive Chart. For the graph here we selected 2012, 2016, and 2019 (blue). There was an early peak this year on June 12, 2019. How is this data collected (from Greenland Ice Sheet Today – About the Data): Near-real-time images are derived …