CRUCIAL GLOBAL WARMING FACT 4
GREENLAND ALREADY HAS LOST 5.5 TRILLION TONS OF ICE SINCE 1970
The FOURTH crucial, critical, earth-changing fact about global warming, which any voter, and any candidate for Congress, should know about – even if they do not memorize or remember any of the numbers below – is this:
The Greenland ice sheet is being destroyed. It is being dismantled. It is being wrecked. The water that it once held, is now running off of the surface of Greenland, and into the oceans, in the form of "ice-melt" rivers which simply did not exist, twenty years ago.
A first number might help people understand just how incredibly fast this is happening: on a single day, in August 2021, a complex and coordinated set of measurements were taken, by multiple teams, at multiple locations (including unmanned locations, with various sensors coupled to data transmitters), all around Greenland, to get the best actual measurements the researchers could get, to see just how fast the Greenland ice sheet is being destroyed.
Their measurements indicated that on just that one, single, specific day, nearly 20 billion tons of water, which had melted, ran off of the Greenland ice sheet, and entered the ocean.
As a brief aside, the actual number set forth in the websites and reports, was 18 billion tons of water lost, from Greenland, on that one day in August 2021. However, researchers in Greenland use metric weights, rather than the “English” system. Since a kilogram is equal to about 2.204 pounds (i.e., English pounds), a metric ton is only 1000 kilograms; but, that number translates into about 2204 pounds. So, any measurement which is reported in metric tons, must have another 10% added to it, to convert it into the “English” tons that American voters know about, and understand. Therefore, 18 metric tons is equal to 19.8 English tons; and, all tonnages referred to herein have been converted into English (American) tons (i.e., 2000 pounds).
Another number describes the total amount of ice that has been lost, and dumped into the ocean, from the Greenland ice sheet, over the past few decades. There are several ways to write this number; and, several of those ways are listed below, in the hope that at least ONE of those numbers will somehow land, and stick, in the minds of at least some voters, and some candidates for Congress:
Version 1: FIVE AND A HALF (5.5) TRILLION TONS of water have already melted from the Greenland ice sheet, and have been added to the oceans on this planet, since about 1970;
Version 2: FIVE AND A HALF . . . THOUSAND . . . GIGA-TONS (i.e., five and a half THOUSAND units, with A BILLION TONS, IN EACH AND EVERY UNIT) have already melted from the Greenland ice sheet, and have been added to the oceans on this planet;
Version 3: FIVE AND A HALF . . . MILLION . . . MEGA-TONS (i.e., five and a half MILLION units, with a MILLION TONS in each and every unit) have already melted from the Greenland ice sheet, and have been added to the oceans on this planet.
And now, here is another fact: the rocks and mountains of Greenland are unusually dark shades of gray, to a point where they can fairly be described as "almost black." Here are three sample pictures, taken at different locations, with different camera settings:
Greenland contains the most ancient rocks that have ever been discovered, on this planet. Almost all of its surface layer is classic "igneous" rock, in the granite and basalt categories, created directly by the cooling of lava (or "magma"), as the surface of the planet cooled down and solidified, very early during the formation of the planet. As a result, the rocks which are being exposed, as the Greenland ice sheet melts, are darker than most of the land areas in most other parts of the world. Therefore, as soon as the unusually dark rocks in Greenland are exposed to sunlight, by the loss of snow and ice cover, they begin grabbing and absorbing heat energy carried by sunlight, at exceptionally high rates.
And, so, the rates at which the Greenland ice sheet will melt, and run off the rocks, and into the ocean, will continue to grow faster, and faster, and even faster than that, as more and more of its snow and ice cover is lost. In other words, the melting of the Greenland ice sheet poses yet another "runaway" (or self-reinforcing, self-accelerating, or similar terms) condition, which will speed itself up, and occur at even faster rates, the more it continues to happen, and becomes even worse.
Anyway . . . the NEXT page will move on, to a different set of places, south of the arctic, down to the coastlines where lots and lots of people (about THREE BILLION, for anyone who wants an advance peek at THAT number) currently live . . . and prefer to live . . . at least for now . . . while they still can.
