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The amount of Greenland ice that melted on Tuesday could cover Florida in 2 inches of water [cnn.com]:

The amount of Greenland ice that melted on Tuesday could cover Florida in 2 inches of water

It's the third instance of extreme melting on the continent in the past decade, during which time the melting has stretched farther inland than the entire satellite era, which began in the 1970s.

Greenland lost more than 8.5 billion tons of surface mass on Tuesday, and 18.4 billion tons since Sunday, according to the Denmark Meteorological Institute. While this week's total ice loss is not as extreme as a similar event in 2019 — a record melt year [cnn.com] — the area of the ice sheet that's melting is larger.

"It's a significant melt," Ted Scambos, a senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado, told CNN. "July 27th saw most of the eastern half of Greenland from the northern tip all the way to the southern tip mostly melted, which is unusual."

A massive ice melting event is taking place in #Greenland [twitter.com], according to @PolarPortal [twitter.com]
It would be enough to cover Florida in 2 inches (5 cm) of water
Not as extreme as 2019 in terms of gigatons but the melt area is a bit larger than 2 years ago.#ClimateChange [twitter.com]#ClimateAction [twitter.com]pic.twitter.com/Ai7RaWWebK [t.co]

— World Meteorological Organization (@WMO) July 29, 2021 [twitter.com]

As human-caused climate change warms the planet, ice loss has increased rapidly. According to a recent study published in the journal Cryosphere [copernicus.org], Earth has lost a staggering 28 trillion tonnes of ice since the mid-1990s, a large portion of which was from the Arctic, including the Greenland ice sheet.

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