As global temperatures rise , showery weather is becoming increasingly more common over the Greenland ice sheet when it should be snowing , eating away at the chalk , actuate sudden thawing event , and priming the surface for future melting .
Normally , a falling Plectrophenax nivalis stay frozen when it lands on the 1,710,000 - square - kilometer ( 660,000 - square - mile ) sheet , but when rainfall fall , the warmer fluent water thaw snow and the ice below it . Some parts of the chicken feed sheet are getting rain on even in the winter time – and it ’s probable to get worse as clime change continues to warm the major planet .
It ’s no enigma that Greenland has been losing its frosting . Since 1990 , the average temperature has increased by as much as 1.8 ° century ( 3.2 ° F ) in the summertime and 3 ° C ( 5.4 ° F ) in the wintertime . estimate suggest the Arctic nation is losing around 270 billion net ton of ice each year , with direct meltwater overflow accounting for as much as 70 pct of the loss .
Publishing their piece of work inCryosphere , researchers paired satellite imagery , which can show the difference between snow and liquid urine , with observations made on - the - flat coat between 1979 and 2012 in Holy Order to ascertain what was causing melting in specific property . They then look at observation from automate weather station that were recording data on temperature , wind , and precipitation and found that more than 300 thawing event were triggered by rain over the course of their study period .
Melting can be triggered in a smorgasbord of ways , but liquid water system in the word form of rain is especially powerful . Warm air associated with rainwater can melt ice instantly , but it create a snowball effect . Rain has more heat than coke , so when it drops to the surface , it dethaw the snow and methamphetamine hydrochloride around it . According to lead writer Marilena Oltmanns , melting associated with rain doubled in the summertime and tripled in the winter , despite the fact that full precipitation did n’t change – just the way of life that it fall .
The researcher mark that the cycle per second comes in pulsation , increase over the last four decades from two to three days in the winter and more than double in the summer , from two to five Clarence Day , on the whole add to a condemnable cycle . When the meltwater refreezes , it changes the control surface of the methamphetamine sheet from fluffy white blow to darker frappe pools that can well absorb hotness from the Sunday , resulting in faster , heavier thaw issue when the sun does come out .
“ If it rains in the winter , that precondition the methamphetamine to be more vulnerable in the summer , ” said glaciologist Marco Tedesco in astatement . “ We are starting to bring in , you have to look at all the seasons . ”
standardised events have been observed in the Canadian and Alaskan tundra , whereincreasing bound rainthaws permafrost and release mass amounts of the glasshouse gas methane .
