You Know There’s Something Wrong When Vast Expanses of Greenland Look Like A Blackened Volcanic Crater

Lowest albedo on record for Greenland.

1 October, 2014

That’s what data provided by NASA and processed by polar scientist Jason Box are showing for August of 2014.

But it doesn’t take a polar scientist to tell you something is dreadfully wrong with this:

(Swaths of Greenland’s Ice Sheet look more like a volcanic crater than mountains of frozen water. Video source: Dark Snow.)

The above video, provided by the Dark Snow Project and featured on Peter Sinclair’s fantastic Climate Crocks blog, shows a vast swath of the Greenland Ice Sheet from helicopter. Miles and miles of previously pristine ice now show a blackening similar in color to volcanic basalt. A color vastly uncharacteristic of Greenland and more suited to melting and salted snow in an urban parking lot.

Melt is a primary driver of such widespread blackening of the Greenland Ice Sheet. Compaction and removal of snow through melting of the surface layer uncovers dirt, dust and soot left over through the years and millennia, depositing it in a dense layer just beneath the newly melted and washed away snow.

Snow and ice darkening is also compounded by vastly expanding Arctic wildfires. And this year featured the most severe outbreak of wildfires on record for the Northwest Territory of Canada together with extreme and explosive fires throughout Arctic Siberia.The dark soot ejected in immense plumes from these fires is borne aloft by the winds, eventually falling together with rain and snow over the Greenland Ice Sheet.

Lastly, manmade sources of black and brown carbon are also implicated in the great ice sheet’s blackening. And, during recent years, with the explosion of dark particulate sources in developing countries and through global slash and burn agriculture, more and more dark particulate from human activities is finding its way to the great ice sheet.

The net effected is Greenland ice sheet albedo dropping like a rock.

(Falling like a rock. Greenland Ice Sheet albedo hits record low for August of 2014. Data source: NASA MOD10A1. Data Processed by: Dr. Jason Box.)

Albedo is a measure of reflectivity. The less reflective an ice sheet is, the more vulnerable it is to melting through direct heating by solar radiation. The ice sheet surface absorbs more energy from the sun’s rays as reflectivity falls and this process, in turn, further hastens a melt that is already being amplified by human-caused atmospheric and ocean heating.

But charts and graphs do little justice to this ongoing tragedy. In looking at vast stretches of ice, now colored an ominous grey-black, blanketing Greenland, it becomes all-too-easy to realize that we are likely witnessing the start of the Great Ice Sheet’s demise.

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