By Tom Yulsman, Source: Discover Magazine

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Springtime melting of snow in Greenland spiked over the past week, adding a bit of an exclamation mark to the start of the warm season there.

Melting of snow along the fringes of the Greenland Ice Sheet as temperatures warm in the spring is perfectly normal. You can see its effects in the image above, acquired by NASA’s Terra satellite on Monday, June 16. The grayish-blue band dotted by little blue melt ponds shows where snow and maybe some ice is thawing.

This year, the melt season got off to a moderately fast start, but for the most part only in the southernmost part of the island. Then, things got “a bit more interesting,” says Ted Scambos, lead scientist for the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder. (In the interest of full disclosure: Ted is a colleague of mine at CU-Boulder, where I run the Center for Environmental Journalism.)

Starting last weekend, the geographical extent of surface melting expanded from about 10 percent of the island to 40 percent.

See more at: Discover Magazine