Greenland lost a record amount of ice during an extra warm 2019, with the melt massive (巨大的) enough to cover California in more than 4 feet of water, a new study said.
After two years when summer ice melt had been the smallest, the summer of 2019 broke all records with 586 billion tons of ice melting, according to a report. The loss is far more than the yearly average of 259 billion tons of ice since 2003, and it easily breaks the previous record of 511 billion tons in 2012.
“Not only is the Greenland ice sheet melting, but it’s melting at a faster and faster pace,” said study lead author Ingo Sasgen, a geoscientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany. The study also showed that there were many years in the 20th century when Greenland actually gained ice. The Greenland melt in 2019 added 0.06 inches to global sea level rise. That sounds like a tiny amount, but “in our world it’s huge — that’s astonishing,” said study coauthor Alex Gardner, a nice scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge. With more water from other melting ice sheets and glaciers (冰川), the ocean expands and that translates into slowly rising sea levels, coastal flooding and other problems.
Though general ice-melt records in Greenland go back to 1948，scientists began making more precise records in 2003, using NASA satellites to measure the gravity of the ice sheets. It’s like put-ting the ice on a scale and weighing it as water flows off, Gardner said.
In 2017 and 2018, cooler Arctic air flowed from the open ocean into Greenland, which made the melt less severe. Several other scientists said Sasgen’s study made sense. “The fact that 2019 set an all-time record is very concerning,” one of them said.
【小题1】What happened to Greenland in 2019?| A．It gained some ice. |
| B．It lost more ice than any year. |
| C．Its ice loss was first recorded. |
| D．Its ice melted in the smallest amount. |
| A．Ice melt may result in disasters. |
| B．The globe is getting warmer slowly. |
| C．There was a tiny rise in sea level in 2019. |
| D．In 2003, scientists weighed the ice sheets. |
| A．Excited. | B．Relieved. |
| C．Puzzled. | D．Worried. |
| A．Greenland put the globe in danger |
| B．Ice sheets are melting faster globally |
| C．Ice melt in Greenland broke records |
| D．Satellites help measure Greenland’s ice sheet |
