I don’t know about all of you, but here in southern Illinois, this past summer was like nothing I’ve previously experienced. To be fair, I’ve only lived in Illinois for sixteen years, but from talking to folks whose families built our 200-year-old town, this area doesn’t even have family stories of “back in my day, we had this one summer that was so hot…” 

Well, this summer was so hot that gardeners didn’t have to worry about their baby garden planets getting caught in a late freeze; they had to worry about their seedlings getting caught in an early scorching heat. I have to admit, when temperatures reached into the 90s Fahrenheit in May, I forfeited planting my normal shade crops of beans and lettuce and let the hardier weeds own the yard. I’m going to regret this choice in a couple of weeks when I prep the gardens for winter, but summer has been so far out of the norm that kitchen gardens that would normally have been planted and forgotten required regular watering and extra care.

What I experienced here in the great plains was echoed in a variety of ways all around our planet as rivers in the European Union ran dry, and heat soared across the world. As we ended our last season, we brought you stories of Greenland experiencing rain instead of snow for the first time in some places, and now, we’re here to bring you news of a spike in glacial melt occurring in Greenland that has never been seen – let alone seen in September – ever before.

The Washington Post reported on September 6 that over the Labor Day weekend Greenland lost about 20 billion tons of ice. That is 7% of what Greenland loses in a normal year, and that is water heading into the North Atlantic Ocean where it will contribute to sea level rise and lower the salinity of the ocean, which changes ocean circulation patterns.

The rise caused by those 20 billion tons won’t be measurable. It takes thirteen times that much melt to raise the sea by just one millimeter, but Greenland is just one place where we are seeing massive glacier melt. More than one-third of Pakistan has been under water under the one-two punch of massive rains and accelerated glacier melt.

In Russia’s Northern Kamchatka Peninsula, the 405 glaciers lost 4.9 billion tons of ice from 2000 to 2016 due to temperature increases. While this region can normally expect to receive 1.2 meters of snow a year, a weather phenomenon called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation is expected to reduce snowfall and accelerate this melt. This work is published in a new paper in the Journal of Glaciology and was led by Shungo Fukumoto. 

This is your reminder that it takes time to do research and get results through the review process and published. This paper reflects conditions six years ago… and things are only accelerating.

The Arctic and Antarctic regions are the fastest-changing in the world. Some of this change is now visible out airplane windows and on Google Maps. The Arctic tundra is greening, and land that has been frozen for centuries is now both revealing millennia-old flora and fauna and allowing the growth of plants normally seen only in warmer climates. These places are developing warmer climates, so I should probably say they are growing plants normally only seen in lower latitudes.

This greening is problematic in a number of ways. The green plants absorb more sunlight than snow or ice, which reflect sunlight away. This absorbed heat is reradiated over time and is actually leading to white spruce trees growing in new and more northern parts of Alaska. Forests not only absorb heat, but they also prevent as much snow from building up and cooling the ground. Our world, one plant at a time, is fundamentally changing.

And it’s not just in the northern hemisphere. The Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica – about the size of Florida – is also melting at rapid rates. It can raise the ocean by ten feet or just over three meters. In a new study in Nature Geoscience, researchers find that while this glacier actually existed during the otherwise warm Cretaceous period, it is now undergoing rapid retreat. Satellites haven’t caught all the change, and in studies that looked at the ocean floor, researchers led by Alastair Graham found the glacier is retreating 2.1 kilometers a year, which is twice the expected rate.

So, ah… yeah. It’s all melting, and people around the world rely on glacier melt as a major source of fresh water. This means that not only do we need to worry about oceans rising, ocean salinity changing, and flood damage… we also have droughts to look forward to when those glaciers are gone.

More Information

For first time on record, Greenland saw extensive melting in September (The Washington Post)

Hokkaido University press release

“Glacier mass change on the Kamchatka Peninsula, Russia, from 2000 to 2016,” Shungo Fukumoto et al., 2022 July 4, Journal of Glaciology

The greening of the Arctic tundra (National Geographic)

Warming Temperatures are Driving Arctic Greening (NASA)

These Trees Are Spreading North in Alaska. That’s Not Good (Wired)

“Sufficient conditions for rapid range expansion of a boreal conifer,” Roman J. Dial, Colin T. Maher, Rebecca E. Hewitt and Patrick F. Sullivan, 2022 August 10, Nature

University of South Florida press release

“Rapid retreat of Thwaites Glacier in the pre-satellite era,” Alastair G. C. Graham et al., 2022 September 5, Nature Geoscience