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As Greenland’s glaciers melt, gigantic chunks of ice are breaking off. They are so large that they are causing powerful earthquakes as they tumble into the ocean.

A team of researchers from Swansea University in the UK, the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, and a number of other institutions, studied GPS data from Greenland’s fast-moving Helheim Glacier, and the glacier’s calving front, where icebergs break off into the ocean, and correlated this with seismic data for earthquake timings. They found that large earthquakes, in the 4.6 to 5.2 range, are generated when billion-ton ice sheets break off from the glacier’s forward face.
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Over the past few months, Arctic reporting stations have been reporting an unexpected increase in the outgassing of methane from thawing permafrost. Methane is an extremely potent greenhouse gas. In the past, the sudden release of methane from arctic tundras and methane hydrates under the Arctic Ocean have been connected to the spikes in heat that mark the end of interglacials. Methane readings from the station in Alert, Canada, are showing an increase in methane of 20 parts per billion over one year, an increase of 2-3 times over the global average from the past five years, and readings from Barrow (Alaska), Summit (Greenland), and Svalbard (Norway) all show similar trends.
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Researchers have declared that the Earth is entering a mass extinction event, and that it is being caused by humans, but this is part of a much larger story.

A team at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment have published a study that says that we are entering a sixth great mass extinction event, where the current rate of species loss is over 100 times that of what would normally be seen. The study also says that this is what they consider to be a conservative estimate; that this rate the loss in biodiversity benefits to humans will be seen within three generations, and that 75 percent of Earth’s species could be lost within two generations.
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Last month was recorded as the hottest May on record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), since the organization started recording temperatures in 135 years ago. The previous 4 months were each the hottest on record for that month as well. 2015 is forecast to break last year’s record for the highest global average temperature once again. Thirteen of the 14 hottest years on record have been in this century.
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