#unprecendented

It’s Unprecedented!

I have been thinking about purging my vocabulary. Think of it as a mental variation of spring cleaning. Like changing most habits, it takes a little effort. Usually the words under review are ones from my youth that no one in my adult world uses. Like “creamed” as a description of potatoes. Apparently most everyone else knows them as “mashed potatoes,” as I discovered upon arrival in Hoosier land.

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/greenland-melt.html

For several days this month, Greenland's surface ice cover melted over a larger area than at any time in more than 30 years of satellite observations. Nearly the entire ice cover of Greenland, from its thin, low-lying coastal edges to its two-mile-thick center, experienced some degree of melting at its surface, according to measurements from three independent satellites analyzed by NASA and university scientists. On average in the summer, about half of the surface of Greenland's ice sheet naturally melts. At high elevations, most of that melt water quickly refreezes in place. Near the coast, some of the melt water is retained by the ice sheet and the rest is lost to the ocean. But this year the extent of ice melting at or near the surface jumped dramatically. According to satellite data, an estimated 97 percent of the ice sheet surface thawed at some point in mid-July. Researchers have not yet determined whether this extensive melt event will affect the overall volume of ice loss this summer and contribute to sea level rise.

(Well I dunno. You fuckin' tell me.) "The Greenland ice sheet is a vast area with a varied history of change. This event, combined with other natural but uncommon phenomena, such as the large calving event last week on Petermann Glacier, are part of a complex story," said Tom Wagner, NASA's cryosphere program manager in Washington. "Satellite observations are helping us understand how events like these may relate to one another as well as to the broader climate system."