Before this year, the Greenland ice sheet had never grown anywhere-close to 4 Gigatons in any of the months of June, July, or August, according to DMI records (which go back to 1981). In addition, the DMI record books also reveal that yesterday's 4 Gt GAIN smashed the previous mid-Aug record by over 2 full Gigatons.
Here are the latest (Aug 10, 2020) measurements:
Crucial to the survival of a glacier is its surface mass balance (SMB) - the difference between accumulation and ablation (sublimation and melting). Changes in SMB control a glacier's long-term behavior, and are its most sensitive climate indicators (wikipedia.org).
Yesterday, Greenland's SMB hit truly-historic levels for the time of year:
Blue line (Gt/day): total daily contribution to the SMB from the entire ice sheet. Grey line: mean value from 1981-2010 (DMI).
The tide has turned in Greenland.
And that trend of GROWTH has ACCELERATED in 2020 — this is BIG news.
This is how GLACIERS build.
This is also how ICE AGES begin.
The COLD TIMES are returning, the lower-latitudes are refreezing, in line with historically low solar activity, cloud-nucleating Cosmic Rays, and a meridional jet stream flow. Even NASA agrees, in part at least, with their forecast for this upcoming solar cycle (25) seeing it as "the weakest of the past 200 years," with the agency correlating previous solar shutdowns to prolonged periods of global cooling here.
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