Greenland ice sheet melt

For the first time ever recorded, in the late summer of 2021, rain fell on the high central region of the Greenland ice sheet. This extraordinary event was preceded by a heatwave and followed by a rapid melt of the surface snow and ice. This image captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission on 23 August 2021 depicts the severity of the melt. 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