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CRUCIAL GLOBAL WARMING FACT 4
GREENLAND ALREADY HAS LOST MORE THEN 5.5 TRILLION TONS OF ICE SINCE 1970
The FOURTH crucial, critical, earth-changing fact about global warming, which any voter, and any candidate for Congress, should know about – even if they do not memorize or remember any of the numbers below – is this:
The Greenland ice sheet is being destroyed. It is being dismantled. It is being wrecked. The water that it once held, is now running off of the surface of Greenland, and into the oceans, in the form of "ice-melt" rivers which simply did not exist, twenty years ago. And, as described in the next fact, on the next page, that water is non-salty "fresh water", which is less dense than the salt water in the deeper layers of the oceans. There is nothing that will cause those layers to actively mix together; so, the top layer of less-dense fresh water is creating a "thermal blanket" on top of the oceans, which is going to cause catastrophic effects for the climate, for other reasons, described on the next page.
A first number might help people understand just how incredibly fast this is happening: on a single day, in August 2021, a complex and coordinated set of measurements were taken, by multiple teams, at multiple locations (including unmanned locations, with various sensors coupled to data transmitters), all around Greenland, to get the best actual measurements the researchers could get, to see just how fast the Greenland ice sheet is being destroyed.
Their measurements indicated that on just that one, single, specific day, nearly TWENTY BILLION TONS of water, which had melted, ran off of the Greenland ice sheet, and entered the ocean.
As a brief aside, the actual number set forth in the websites and reports, was 18 billion tons of water lost, from Greenland, on that one day in August 2021. However, researchers in Greenland use metric weights, rather than the “English” system. Since a kilogram is equal to about 2.204 pounds (i.e., English pounds), a metric ton is only 1000 kilograms; but, that number translates into about 2204 pounds. So, any measurement which is reported in metric tons, must have another 10% added to it, to convert it into the “English” tons that American voters know about, and understand. Therefore, 18 metric tons is equal to 19.8 English tons; and, all tonnages referred to herein have been converted into English (American) tons (i.e., 2000 pounds).
Another number describes the total amount of ice that has been lost, and dumped into the ocean, from the Greenland ice sheet, over the past few decades. There are several ways to write this number; and, several of those ways are listed below, in the hope that at least ONE of those numbers will somehow land, and stick, in the minds of at least some voters, and some candidates for Congress:
Version 1: FIVE AND A HALF (5.5) TRILLION TONS of water had already melted from the Greenland ice sheet, and had been added to the oceans on this planet, between 1970, and 2022;
Version 2: FIVE AND A HALF . . . THOUSAND . . . GIGA-TONS (i.e., five and a half THOUSAND units, with A BILLION TONS, IN EACH AND EVERY UNIT) had melted from the Greenland ice sheet, and had been added to the oceans on this planet, by 2022;
Version 3: FIVE AND A HALF . . . MILLION . . . MEGA-TONS (i.e., five and a half MILLION units, with a MILLION TONS in each and every unit) had already melted from the Greenland ice sheet, and had been added to the oceans on this planet, by 2022.
And now, here is another fact: the rocks and mountains of Greenland are unusually dark shades of gray, to a point where they can fairly be described as "almost black." Here are three sample pictures, taken at different locations, with different camera settings:
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Greenland contains the most ancient rocks that have ever been discovered on this planet. Almost all of its surface layer is "igneous" rock, in the granite and basalt categories, created directly by the cooling of lava (or "magma"), as the surface of the planet cooled down and solidified, very early during the formation of the planet. As a result, the rocks which are being exposed, as the Greenland ice sheet melts, are darker than most of the land areas in most other parts of the world. Therefore, as soon as the unusually dark rocks in Greenland are exposed to sunlight, by the loss of snow and ice cover, they begin grabbing and absorbing heat energy carried by sunlight, at exceptionally high rates, BECAUSE OF their extra-dark colors.
And, so, the rates at which the Greenland ice sheet will melt, and run off the rocks, and into the ocean, will continue to grow faster, and faster, and even faster than that, as more and more of its snow and ice cover is lost. In other words, the melting of the Greenland ice sheet poses yet another "runaway" (or self-reinforcing, self-accelerating, vicious circle, or similar terms) condition, which will speed itself up, and occur at even faster rates, the more it continues to happen and becomes even worse. It is now on an "exponential curve", which means that the worse it gets, the more it will get even worse than than, even faster.
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