The Greenland ice sheet is melting unusually fast

GREENLAND’S misnomer is the result of a marketing campaign by Erik the Red who wished to attract Viking settlers to its icy landscape. Little did he know that the land had been covered in lush forests many millennia before he was born. Nor could he have fathomed that, a millennium after his death, the vast ice sheet would be in rapid retreat.

The ice atop Greenland holds enough water to raise global sea levels by more than seven metres, should it all melt and run off into the oceans. For this reason, climate scientists closely monitor its seasonal trends, and in particular how quickly it melts in the spring leading up to the late summer “ice minimum”, after which it starts to grow again.