Greenland just experienced another massive melt event this year. But this time, something unusual happened. It also rained at the summit of the ice sheet, [Editor’s note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source] nearly two miles above sea level. From a report: Around 6 a.m. Saturday, staff at the National Science Foundation’s Summit Station woke up to raindrops and water beads condensed on the station’s windows. Rain occasionally falls on the ice sheet, but no staff member recalls rain — even a light drizzle — ever occurring at the summit before. “Basically, the entire day of Saturday, it was raining every hour that [staff] was making weather observations,” said Zoe Courville, a research engineer at the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory. “And that’s the first time that’s been observed happening at the station.”
The rain coincided with warmer temperatures that caused extensive melting across the ice sheet. Some areas were more than 18 degrees Celsius warmer than the average temperature. At the summit, temperatures peaked at 33 degrees Fahrenheit — within a degree above freezing. The melt extent peaked at 337,000 square miles on Saturday, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). This was slightly smaller than the melting event that occurred this summer on July 28, which covered 340,000 square miles of the ice sheet, but it is still significant. Only 2012 and 2021 had multiple melt events covering more than 309,000 square miles in a year.
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