Rain Fell at the Normally Snowy Summit of Greenland for the First Time on Record

upstart writes:

Rain fell at the normally snowy summit of Greenland for the first time on record:

Temperatures at the Greenland summit over the weekend rose above freezing for the third time in less than a decade. The warm air fueled an extreme rain event that dumped 7 billion tons of water on the ice sheet, enough to fill the Reflecting Pool at the National Mall in Washington, DC, nearly 250,000 times.

It was the heaviest rainfall on the ice sheet since record keeping began in 1950, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, and the amount of ice mass lost on Sunday was seven times higher than normal for this time of year.

The New York Times adds It Rained at the Summit of Greenland. That's Never Happened Before:

Something extraordinary happened last Saturday at the frigid high point of the Greenland ice sheet, two miles in the sky and more than 500 miles above the Arctic Circle: It rained for the first time.

The rain at a research station - not just a few drops or a drizzle but a stream for several hours, as temperatures rose slightly above freezing - is yet another troubling sign of a changing Arctic, which is warming faster than any other region on the planet.

"It's incredible, because it does write a new chapter in the book of Greenland," said Marco Tedesco, a researcher at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. "This is really new."

At the station, which is called Summit and is occupied year-round under the auspices of the National Science Foundation, there is no record of rain since observations began in the 1980s. And computer simulations show no evidence going back even further, said Thomas Mote, a climate scientist at the University of Georgia.

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