Arctic Ice is Crashing, and That's Bad News for Everyone. Over the next few days, Greenland is expected to roast as the weather system that fueled Europe's second record-smashing heatwave of the summer marches north and west. Scientists are warning of what could be a near-record melt-out across the northern ice sheet's surface, one that may also impact sea ice surrounding the island. It's just the latest manifestation of the high fever gripping the Arctic in a year where sea ice is running near record-low levels and Greenland has already sweated through one major melt event in June. Vice

 

The Arctic is Experiencing its Worst Wildfire Season on Record. The Arctic Circle is in the midst of an "unprecedented" wildfire season on record, with more than 100 blazes raging across the region since the start of June. As Mark Parrington, senior scientist at the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS), tells CNN's Isabelle Gerretsen, the scale and intensity of these recent wildfires is "unusual and unprecedented."  Smithsonian

 

The Bizarre, Peaty Science of Arctic Wildfires. Here's a sentence for you: The Arctic is burning. Yes, that Arctic-the traditionally cold and wet one, large swaths of which are being consumed by an astonishing number of wildfires, from Russia to Greenland to Alaska. "Arctic fires-the combination of these two words is still an unusual term in my field of fire science," says Guillermo Rein of Imperial College London. "Arctic fires are rare, but they're not unprecedented. What is unprecedented is the number of fires that are happening. Never before have satellites around the planet seen this level of activity." WIRED

 

Europe's Heatwave Threatens to Push Greenland Toward Record Melting. As a heat wave baked Europe last week, officials with the World Meteorological Organization warned that the unusually warm temperatures were poised to affect Greenland as well - threatening to cause a record-setting melt of the island's ice cap. The European heatwave has already set records in nearby Nordic nations. Greenland's ice sheet previously saw record melting in 2012, the same year that Arctic sea ice reached its lowest recorded summer minimum. A Danish researcher told the Washington Post that conditions this summer constitute "a very similar situation to 2012." Arctic Today

 

Underwater Glacial Melting is Occurring at Higher Rates Than Modeling Predicts. Researchers have developed a new method to allow for the first direct measurement of the submarine melt rate of a tidewater glacier, and, in doing so, they concluded that current theoretical models may be underestimating glacial melt by up to two orders of magnitude. Science Daily