{"id":25592,"date":"2026-06-27T17:50:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-27T21:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/?p=25592"},"modified":"2026-06-27T17:50:00","modified_gmt":"2026-06-27T21:50:00","slug":"satellites-recorded-melting-greenland-single-july","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/satellites-recorded-melting-greenland-single-july\/25592\/","title":{"rendered":"Satellites recorded melting across 81% of Greenland in a single July week, and what they measured inside the ice is sharpening the melt forecast"},"content":{"rendered":"

Picture a country the size of Alaska, and imagine more than four fifths of it<\/strong> undergoing surface melting in the space of a week.<\/p>\n

That is what happened over Greenland last July, and the satellites watching from orbit did not miss a single moment.<\/p>\n

What they measured across that vast area is not just a story about melting ice.<\/p>\n

It is a story about a hidden clock<\/strong> buried inside the ice itself, and what it is now telling scientists about the future.<\/p>\n

The summer the melt broke records<\/h2>\n

Every year, Greenland’s melt season follows a familiar rhythm.<\/p>\n

Snow softens along the coasts in May, water trickles toward the edges, and by September the cold returns.<\/p>\n

During the summer of 2025, a remarkably large area of the ice sheet was melting at once in July, with a prolonged period of high temperatures and coastal melting that pushed the cumulative melt-day extent above the 1981 to 2010 average.<\/p>\n

But one week in July shattered even that picture.<\/p>\n

In mid-July, melting occurred over a record area: for three days in a row, it was present over more than 80% of the ice sheet.<\/p>\n

It peaked at 81.2%<\/strong>, the highest value in a dataset stretching back to 1981.<\/p>\n

That is not a warm summer. That is something else entirely.<\/p>\n

What the satellites see that no plane ever could<\/h2>\n

The only way to watch something this big is from space.<\/p>\n

Scientists delivered the first combined measurements of the Greenland Ice Sheet’s changing thickness using data from ESA’s CryoSat-2 and NASA’s ICESat-2, which together carry altimeters using two different technologies<\/strong>: radar for one, laser for the other.<\/p>\n

Each technology has a blind spot, which is exactly why both are needed.<\/p>\n

Radar signals can pass through clouds but also penetrate the ice surface and must be adjusted.<\/p>\n

Laser signals reflect from the actual surface but cannot record when clouds are present.<\/p>\n

Together, they form a complete eye in the sky, cross-checking each other over every square mile of ice.<\/p>\n

Between 2010 and 2023, the ice sheet thinned by 1.2 meters<\/strong> on average, but in the ablation zone where summer melt outpaces winter snowfall, average thinning reached 6.4 meters.<\/p>\n

The dirty secret inside the gray<\/h2>\n

The gray color itself is part of the problem, and it feeds on itself in a way that feels almost cruel.<\/p>\n

In satellite images, a vast expanse of dirty ice<\/strong> becomes visible, its darker appearance caused by particles like black carbon and dust left behind as the snow melts and impurities concentrate on the surface.<\/p>\n

This darkening reduces the ice’s albedo, its ability to reflect sunlight, causing it to absorb more solar energy and melt even faster.<\/p>\n

Think of it as the ice developing a fever that keeps getting worse the longer it runs.<\/p>\n

Soot, wildfire ash and surface dust increase solar energy absorption, meaning every wildfire season<\/strong> on Earth sends a ripple all the way to Greenland.<\/p>\n

Researchers found that extreme melting events are now happening more often and covering larger areas.<\/p>\n

The surface area affected has expanded by about 2.8 million square kilometers per decade since 1990.<\/p>\n

The Greenland ice sheet’s hidden record, and what losing hundreds of billions of tonnes a year means<\/h2>\n

Here is what makes Greenland unlike anywhere else on Earth.<\/p>\n

The Greenland ice sheet<\/a> is not just frozen water.<\/p>\n

It is a layered archive of every summer and winter going back hundreds of thousands of years, with ancient air bubbles<\/strong> trapped inside each band of ice like chapters in a book.<\/p>\n

When it melts, those chapters disappear forever.<\/p>\n

Greenland has been losing ice every year since the late 1990s, shedding on average around 266 billion tonnes<\/strong> per year in recent decades according to GRACE satellite gravity data, contributing roughly 0.7 millimeters to global sea level rise annually.<\/p>\n

Between 2002 and 2025, that sustained loss has added measurably to coastlines around the world.<\/p>\n

A 2025 modelling study published in The Cryosphere<\/em> identified a surface mass balance threshold of around 230 gigatons per year, a 60% decrease from pre-industrial levels, as the point beyond which the ice sheet could enter an irreversible long-term decline. That finding comes from a single model and carries large uncertainty; the study’s authors note that previous work on the magnitude of such a threshold remains controversial.<\/p>\n

Scientists note this is a very long-term process measured in thousands of years, not decades, but the direction of travel matters now.<\/p>\n

Why the satellites also carry a kind of hope<\/h2>\n

The same space missions watching Greenland dissolve are also the tools that make solutions possible.<\/p>\n

Combining the two satellite systems produces a more reliable estimate of ice loss than either could achieve alone, and means that if one mission fails, the other can maintain the polar ice record<\/strong> without a gap.<\/p>\n

That continuity matters enormously for coastal communities tracking sea level<\/a> projections, and for scientists studying how flooding patterns<\/a> will shift decade by decade.<\/p>\n

The mass balance of the Greenland Ice Sheet for 2025 was -129 gigatons, showing less loss than the 2003 to 2024 annual average of -219 gigatons<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Above-average snowfall helped push the numbers toward a somewhat better year.<\/p>\n

That is not cause for complacency, but it is a reminder that the system still responds to conditions, and that what happens in the atmosphere still matters<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

The ice is a clock, the satellites are its face, and for the first time in history, every person on Earth can read it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Picture a country the size of Alaska, and imagine more than four fifths of it undergoing surface melting in the space of a week. That is what happened over Greenland last July, and the satellites watching from orbit did not miss a single moment. What they measured across that vast area is not just a … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":25591,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rank_math_focus_keyword":"satellites recorded melting","rank_math_title":"Satellites recorded melting across 81% of Greenland in a single July week, and what they measured inside the ice is sharpening the melt forecast","rank_math_description":"In July 2025, melting swept 81% of Greenland's ice sheet at once \u2014 a record. What NASA's satellites found underneath the dirty surface changes the whole picture.","footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25592","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-climate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25592","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25592"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25592\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}