Greenland ice sheet loses 11 billion tons of water in one day amid historic heat originally appeared on abcnews.go.com

Greenland, home to the world's second largest ice sheet, is melting at such an alarming rate that scientists are warning it's on track with worst-case scenario models for the year 2070.

On Wednesday alone, the island lost 11 billion tons of ice, according to the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI). That's enough water to fill 4,400,000 Olympic-size swimming pools.

Video from science journalist Laurie Garrett went viral, showing melt water gushing under a bridge in Kangerlussiauq, a small town in western Greenland at the eastern end of a deep fjord.

This is a roaring glacial melt, under the bridge to Kangerlussiauq, Greenland where it's 22C today and Danish officials say 12 billions tons of ice melted in 24 hours, yesterday. pic.twitter.com/Rl2odG4xWj — Laurie Garrett (@Laurie_Garrett) August 1, 2019

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Greenland has been enduring the heat wave that last week baked Europe, breaking temperature records in five countries. Now, it is accelerating the annual summer melt of the ice sheet and causing massive ice loss.

"The current melt rate is equivalent to what the model projects for 2070, using the most pessimistic model," Xavier Fettweis, a Belgian climate researcher at the University of Liège, said.

(MORE: What to know about the rapid melting of the Greenland ice sheet, a significant contributor to rising sea levels)

PHOTO: Water from melting ice flows into the fjord near Kangerlussaq in western Greenland, Aug. 1, 2019. (Caspar Haarlov/AP) More

There is ice melt every year in the Arctic with slightly warmer months. But temperatures across the ice sheet have reached above freezing, even climbing into the 70's Fahrenheit on parts of the coast, and warmer winter months mean that the ice is less likely to recover.

Since June, 240 billion tons of ice have melted, per DMI. In comparison, 290 billion tons were lost in all of 2018, and August, the last month in peak melting season, has just begun. Melting season also began a month earlier than usual this year, according to DMI.

(MORE: Ice shelf in Antarctica could face melting risk)

Scientists are noticing that these kinds of heat waves are becoming "more and more frequent," Marco Tedesco, a polar scientist specializing in Greenland for the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University in New York, told ABC News in June. At the time, another pocket of air led to clear skies and therefore more solar radiation, baking the eastern part of Greenland and melting 2 billion tons of the ice sheet.

PHOTO: Greenland Melt Extent 2019 (National Snow and Ice Data Center) More

While that melt was shocking, it pales in comparison to the one on Wednesday, as evident in the chart above.

Researchers believe these events are connected to the jet stream, or polar vortex, becoming less stable, which creates high-pressure systems that can be sustained for longer periods of time and leads to the "exceptional melting," Tedesco said.

(MORE: Watch billions of tons of ice collapse at once: How climate change is impacting Greenland's glaciers)

A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in April found that the melting of the Greenland ice sheet has contributed to more than a half-inch of rising ocean waters since 1972, making it the largest contributor of new water into the ocean every year.

The warming has accelerated so much in recent years that about a quarter inch of the additional water occurred in the last eight years, the study found.

PHOTO: An iceberg floats in Disko Bay behind houses during unseasonably warm weather, July 30, 2019, in Ilulissat, Greenland. (Sean Gallup/Getty Images) More

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