How hot exactly is the Earth this year? You might find your answer in a very cold place: Greenland's ice sheet. Despite the end of the melting season still a month away, Greenland has already shed quite a few pounds - more in this season already than ever before actually, and the recent report isn't the first alarming news about the Greenland ice sheet.
"With more yet to come in August, this year's overall melting will fall way above the old records. That's a Goliath year - the greatest melt since satellite recording began in 1979," said study researcher Marco Tedesco, assistant professor of Earth and atmospheric sciences at The City College of New York.
With four weeks to go, melting of the Greenland ice sheet has already surpassed the record-setting 2010 levels.
Professor Tedesco arrived at the conclusion by using microwave satellite sensors to gather data about the extent and duration of the melting.
This isn't the first worrying piece of news about Greenland in 2012, however.
A chunk of ice more than twice the size of Manhattan broke away from the ice sheet in July. The iceberg was around 46 square miles in size, and succeeds a larger iceberg, four times the size of Manhattan, that drifted off in 2010.
Earlier this year, NASA published a report titled "Satellites see Unprecedented Greenland Ice Sheet Melt." It's alarming graphic gave the impression that 97 percent of Greenland was melting.
While 97 percent of the surface did thaw in July, enviro-journalists ran with the sensationalism giving the impression that Greenland would soon go the way of the Wicked Witch of the West. This is, however, not the real case.
"Ice cores from Summit show that melting events of this type occur about once every 150 years on average. With the last one happening in 1889, this event is right on time," said Lora Koenig, a Goddard glaciologist in the NASA press release.
She did rightfully add, "But if we continue to observe melting events like this in upcoming years, it will be worrisome."
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