Greenland’s ice sheet is melting unusually fast

GREENLAND’S MISLEADING name is the result of a marketing campaign by Erik the Red, a tenth-century Norse explorer who wished to attract settlers to its icy landscape. Little did he know that the island had been covered by lush forests many millennia before he was born. Nor could he have fathomed that, a millennium after his death, the vast ice sheet that gave the lie to his inviting description would be in rapid retreat.

That sheet holds enough water to raise the world’s sea level by more than seven metres, should it all melt and run off into the oceans. For this reason, climate scientists monitor the sheet’s seasonal trends closely. In particular, they study the spring melt that leads up to the late summer ice minimum, after which the sheet starts to grow again.