Thirty years of hurt (and eleven years of writing about it) …

Every September, as the melt season on the Greenland ice sheet fizzles out, I and my colleague Martin Stendel do the same thing: we sit down with a year’s worth of daily surface mass balance maps and weather charts from the Polar Portal, work out how the ice sheet fared, and write it up as a guest post for Carbon Brief. Our latest one, covering September 2025 to August 2026 has just appeared over there (yes it’s a little late, we have a lot on right now).This year’s headline is one I’d rather not be celebrating: 2025-26 was the 30th consecutive year that Greenland lost more ice than it gained. The last year the ice sheet ended in the black was 1996. Even in a year with a cool, cloudy June, a late start to the melt season, and an above-average snowfall budget, it still lost around 135bn tonnes of ice. The total mass budget of the Greenland ice sheet showing components from the surface, basal and marine budgets. It struck me, reading back through copy number eleven, that we’ve now been…