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over the past few days we've seen a

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significant amount of actually liquid

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water on the surface that have both

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accumulated in small ponds and probably

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approaching the size of lakes especially

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[Music]

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an interesting thing is that the melt

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season actually in greenland started

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pretty much end of april beginning of

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may which in the grand scheme of things

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is very close to a month earlier than

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than average

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my name is brooke medley i'm the deputy

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project scientist for operation

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icebridge

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last april and may we were actually

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flying in greenland out of kangerluswack

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on the nasa p3 this was somewhat of a

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unique year where we we expected to be

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going early enough where we would see

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the typical

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dry snow conditions but rather we were

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met

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with a much different scenario where we

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saw all these

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spectacular blue ponds of beautiful

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liquid water just pooling on top of the

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surface

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the ice sheet is actually experiencing

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almost an additional month of melt

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because it started so early here part of

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it is actually driven by the fact that

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it's very warm right now but also that

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there was not a lot of snowfall last

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winter and so what that means is

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when the the snow does melt it very

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quickly exposes darker ice which can

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then melt even faster

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it went from

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pretty much frozen over at the surface

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just before the melt started to

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completely unfrozen and the rivers have

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risen and there's just a significant

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increase in the total amount of water

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over the course of 2019

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uh there was so much melt that it

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actually ended up being the second

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largest uh melt water production year

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for the greenland ice sheet since 1980.

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what does it mean for

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2020 is an excellent question so what

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happens when you have a

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an extreme melt years that it can often

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impact a subsequent season so it's

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definitely something we were looking for

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coming into the 2020 season is are we

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going to be seeing another 2019 because

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we've preconditioned the ice sheet to be

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more

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susceptible to melt and and

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interestingly

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right now 2020 is trending along a more

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normal trajectory

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for melt

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that being said this is still just july

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and the biggest pulse of melt water from

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2019 actually occurred

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at the end of july and beginning of

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august so there's still a lot of melt

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season left to go

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it's actually quite simple the longer

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your melt season that means you can just

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have more time to accumulate more melt

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and the only place for this water to go

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is into the ocean so it will be driving

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uh sea level rise and greenland is

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currently outside of the thermal

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expansion of the ocean is the largest