A new study has found that rains are becoming more and more frequent over Greenland leading to melting of ice-sheets even in the Winter season. The long Arctic Winter season usually sees very less or no rain. This however has changed over the time and this year a very unusual Winter rain was observed over this area.
Moreover, here we are talking the Greenland ice sheet, which is something that can’t be taken non-seriously as it’s the biggest storehouse of frozen water in the World. According to an estimate, if all this ice melted this would account to about a 7-meters rise in sea levels all around the Earth which is humongous.
Precipitation takes place in the form of snow in Winters which makes up for the loss of melting snow in Summers.
Scientists have published their findings in a journal called ‘The Cryosphere’, noting that the earlier chances of a normally occurring two spells of winter rain every year has now risen to 12 spells by 2012.
Additionally, the rain changes the characteristics of the snow surface, making it smoother and darker, and more vulnerable to melt speedily when the summer arrives.
The darker the ice is, the more heat it absorbs from the Sun - causing it to melt more quickly.
If anything, these untimely rains have something to say about how close we are heading to a catastrophe, and ‘now’ is the right time to take an action against it.
Image Credits – BBC
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