A Monumental Storm Dropped 16 Billion Tons of Snow on Greenland, Slowing Melt of Ice Sheet

The ice cover in Greenland is the second largest ice cover on Earth, and because of the high temperatures on the planet, it melts. Human climate change intensifies weather, but new research indicates that its effect on Greenland’s ice cover is more complicated than it was believed.

The pair of research of the recent effect of an intense river in the atmosphere – a channel of water vapor that brings moisture and heat from the warmer oceans to the cold areas – has achieved the ice cover in Greenland. Unfortunately, they found that this phenomenon deposited 16 billion tons of snow in Greenland, which is enough to temporarily slow down the ice. As detailed in a study published on March 3 in the journalistic geophysical research letters, weather rivers may have a more positive effect than theoretically researchers.

“I was surprised by the snow that was thrown at the ice cover throughout this short period,” Alon Hubard, an ice scientist at the University of Tromsu and the author of the study in a US Geophysical Union (AGU). “I thought it would be an accurate amount, but it is a contribution to the Gobsmacking in Greenland’s annual ice block.”

Global warming dissolves ice leaves in Greenland at unprecedented prices. In 2023, the ice cover lost 80 GB of water – about 660,430 gallons (2.5 million liters) of water per second. In 2024, it decreased for the 28th year in a row. If the entire ice cover melts, the sea level will increase by more than 23 feet (7 meters). Climate scientists expect that climate change will also condense weather rivers, making them stronger and more frequent, which may accelerate the loss of ice in Greenland.

However, the atmosphere that occurred in March 2022 challenges this idea. At the time, the main author Hannah Billy, a Giusivist at the University of Ou, was in Svles. When the atmosphere hit the small Norwegian archipelago with severe rain, Billy wondered what it was 1,245 miles (2000 km), in Greenland. A year later, she and Hobard traveled to southeast Greenland to investigate the matter.

>

There, the researchers collected a 49 -foot (15 meters) of the integrated snow that gradually turns into ice. Ice cores are the guards of nature records, and this documentation is approximately one of the accumulation of snow with a value of 10 years. By comparing the complex analyzes of the ice with local weather data, Billy and Hopard identified the basic ice section corresponding to the 2022 atmosphere.

“The use of high -end samples in an oven and theoretical analysis allowed us to determine the exceptional snowfall from this air river,” Billy explained. “It is a rare opportunity to link such an event directly to the balance of the surface mass in Greenland and dynamics.”

The Basic Ice Department revealed that the atmosphere has brought 16 billion tons of snow to Greenland, as it compensates alone for the annual ice loss in the ice cover by 8 % in just three days. As mentioned in the press statement AGU:

The atmosphere was widening Svalbard with the rain, but 2000 km (1245 miles) in southeast Greenland, delivered the snow – and many of it. On March 14, 11.6 billion tons of snow fell on the ice cover, with an additional 4.5 billion tons during the next few days. Gigaton of approximately one kilometer is one cubic kilometer of fresh water, which may fill completely the construction of the Capitol in the United States more than 2200 times.

The event also covered the ice cover with fresh reflective snow, which increased eggs in the area (its ability to reflect sunlight) and prepare seasonal ice melting for about two weeks – despite abnormally warm spring temperatures.

“Unfortunately, the ice cover in Greenland will not be saved by weather rivers,” Hopard said. “But what we see in this new study is that, unlike the prevailing opinions, under the right circumstances, all weather rivers may not be bad news.”

If global temperatures continue to rise, weather rivers can one day bring rain instead of snow to Greenland. In fact, Hobard and Billy emphasizes that further research is needed to understand both the current and future influence of weather rivers on the largest ice mass in the Northern Hemisphere.

Billy concluded that “weather rivers have a double role in the formation of Greenland-in addition to the wider North Pole tools.”