'Unprecedented' rain falls for first time in recorded history at Greenland's ice sheet summit
It rained for several hours at the summit of Greenland's ice sheet on Saturday, marking the first time in recorded history the area has experienced rain and at a time when temperatures there rose above freezing in an extremely rare occurrence.
The rainfall occurred at the highest point on the country's ice sheet, according to the National Snow and Ice Date Center. The weather was observed at Greenland's Summit Station, which is 10,551 feet above sea level, 9 feet short of reaching 2 miles in elevation. Weather recording for the area began in 1950.
In addition to the never-before-recorded rainfall, temperatures were above freezing for over nine hours, only the fourth time in history, but the third time since 2012.
The agency said the reason for the higher temperatures was in relation to a similar event that happened weeks ago that resulted in warm air and moisture being pushed across the country.
The rain mixed with the warmer air resulted in an estimated 7 billion tons of rainfall on the ice sheet, resulting in a loss of surface mass on Sunday that was seven times above the mid-August average, according to the agency. By Monday, the melted area had returned to moderate levels.
Greenland's ice sheet is roughly 656,000-square-miles long, but climate change has resulted in the country's glaciers melting and rising sea levels. If the country's ice sheet were to completely melt and flow into oceans, the global sea level would rise around 23 feet and Earth's rotation would slow down enough to make the length of a day two milliseconds longer, according to NASA. Numerous coastal cities would be impacted as well.
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The rainfall happened less than a week after the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report calling climate change a "code red for humanity."
Ted Scambos, a senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado, told CNN the rainfall was "unprecedented."
"What is going on is not simply a warm decade or two in a wandering climate pattern," he said.
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Greenland ice summit gets rain instead of snow in a bizarre first
