WASHINGTON (Reuters) - For a few days this month, NASA's images of the Greenland ice sheet turned red, indicating that for a while, almost the entire surface of the vast frozen island was melting.
The big melt in Greenland is part of an overall picture of an unusually warm season across the Arctic, with much of the sea route from Western Europe to the Pacific as free of ice in July as it normally would be by summer's end, the chief of the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center said on Wednesday.