Meltwater and surface lakes on the Greenland ice sheet

For the first time ever recorded, in the late summer of 2021, rain fell on the high central area of the Greenland ice sheet. This extraordinary event was preceded by a heatwave and followed by the surface snow and ice rapidly melting. The animation is a series of five images captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission and shows how the surface of the ice sheet changed between on 1, 3 5, 20 and 23 August 2021. The melt, which also created lakes on the surface of the ice, is clear to see. Researchers, supported by ESA’s Science for Society programme, discovered that it wasn’t actually the rain that caused the melt, it was unusually warm ‘atmospheric rivers’ that swept along Greenland, bringing potent melt conditions when the melt season would normally be drawing to a close.

Read full story: Historic Greenland ice sheet rainfall unravelled