Greenland's ice melted 17 times faster than average in May

Greenland's ice has melted 17 times faster than average this year as a wave of warm air has also hit Iceland, according to climate research network World Weather Attribution (WWA). Another study said May 2025 would be the world's second-warmest on record.

“The impact of the melting Greenland ice sheet on sea level rise due to this heat wave is greater than it has ever been,” said one of the report’s authors, Friederike Otto from Imperial College London, during the report’s presentation.

In Iceland, the temperature exceeded 26 degrees C on May 15, which has never happened before this month.

"The temperatures observed in Iceland in May broke all records, exceeding the average daily minimum temperatures in May for the period 1991-2020 by 13 degrees," WWA said in a statement.

According to the Icelandic Meteorological Institute, 94 percent of stations recorded new temperature records in May.

In eastern Greenland, on the warmest day in May, the temperature was 3.9 degrees higher than in the pre-industrial era, i.e. the years 1850-1900, when humans began burning fossil fuels on an industrial scale.

"A heat wave of around 20 degrees Celsius doesn't seem like anything out of the ordinary for most people in the world, but for this region it's a really big problem (...) and it has an impact on the whole world," Otto said.

According to the scientific journal Nature, the Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the world.

For indigenous communities in Greenland, rising temperatures and melting ice mean changing conditions for traditional hunting.

This also affects infrastructure. "In Greenland and Iceland, infrastructure is designed to withstand the cold, which means that during warm periods, melting ice can cause flooding and damage it," WWA stressed.

The EU's Copernicus Climate Service (C3S) said in its latest bulletin that May this year was the second hottest worldwide after last year.

Temperatures were an average of 1.4 degrees above pre-industrial levels in May. That broke a long streak of extreme heat in which the average global temperature was more than 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels in 21 of the past 22 months. Last year was the hottest on record.

"While this may provide the planet with a brief respite, we expect the 1.5 degrees threshold to be crossed again in the near future due to the continued warming of the climate system," said C3S director Carlo Buontempo. (PAP)

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