Last week, a heat wave spurred Greenland’s biggest melting event of the 2021 season so far. The Polar Portal, run by Danish research institutions, stated that enough water melted to cover all of Florida with two inches of water.“It’s becoming more and more common to see these large melt events,” said Lauren Andrews, a glaciologist with NASA’s Global Modeling and Assimilation Office. “That’s because we generally have a warmer climate.”

The heat wave began around July 28 because of a high-pressure system over Greenland. That system cleared clouds from the skies and allowed for more sunlight to reach the ground, causing temperatures inland to soar.

Various models show an unusually high amount of melting during this time. Martin Stendel, a climate researcher at the Danish Meteorological Institute, reported a loss of around 41 gigatons, or 8 gigatons per day, from July 28 to Aug. 1. Xavier Fettweis, a climate scientist from the University of Liège, stated that the loss on July 28 was the third-largest on a single day since 1950.

The melt rates were high, but not unheard of, according to Stendel. He said several days in 2019, a record melt year, exceeded 10 gigatons per day. Unlike 2019, though, this event was more widespread across the territory — particularly on the western and northern coasts.

The melt extent, shown in pink, covered a more widespread area during the recent event in 2021 than in July 2019.

“There was pretty extensive amounts of melt in the northern part of Greenland. It looked like it was actually more extensive than the northern melting we saw in 2019,” Andrews said.