CRUCIAL GLOBAL WARMING FACT 4
GREENLAND LOST MORE THAN 5.5 TRILLION TONS OF ICE,
JUST DURING 1970-2022
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.
These two pictures can help people better understand what is happening. In both pictures, notice the level of turbulence, in the rushing water. This clearly is not "slow and gradual seepage". Instead, these ice-melt rivers are flowing so fast that they are creating what would be called "rapids" in any normal river.
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, 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 10.2% added to it, to convert it into the “English” tons that American voters know about, and understand. Therefore, 18 metric tons is equal to 19.84 English tons; and, all tonnages referred to herein have been converted into English (American) tons (i.e., 2000 pounds).
And, there is another factor which makes this loss of ice even worse. As described 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.
Most people have trouble grasping and understanding what "a million things" actually is, and it is a thousand times harder for them to understand what "a BILLION things" actually is. And, it is a thousand times harder than that, to grasp and understand what the phrase, "a TRILLION things" actually means, in real life. And yet, five TRILLION tons of melted ice water had already been dumped into the ocean, just from Greenland, by the year 2022, and that number is likely to be over six trillion, or possibly even seven trillion, by the time someone reads this. So, anyone who is trying to explain what is actually happening, in the real world, has to try to use some other way, to try to explain what is actually happening.
A square mile contains about 27.9 million square feet (5,280 x 5,280). So, at a density of 62.4 pounds per square foot, a 1-foot depth of water, over a square mile, would weigh about 1.704 billion pounds. And, to get to 5.5 trillion POUNDS, it would take a column of water that would be 3,235 feet tall. And then, to get to 5.5 trillion TONS, one has to multiply that number, by 2000. So, consider a column which covers a square mile, which is 6.5 million feet tall. Or, take that number, and recognize that it is the same as an additional 1 foot of water, spread out over 6.5 million square miles of ocean.
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:
Greenland and eastern upper Canada contain the most ancient rocks that have ever been discovered on this planet. Almost all of their 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.
