Please ignore that thunderous sound…

…it’s just global warming at work. Greenland is, uh, melting:

Atop Greenland’s Suicide Cliff, from where old Inuit women used to hurl themselves when they felt they had become a burden to their community, a crack and a thud like thunder pierce the air.

“We don’t have thunder here. But I know it from movies,” says Ilulissat nurse Vilhelmina Nathanielsen, who hiked with us through the melting snow. “It’s the ice cracking inside the icebergs. If we’re lucky we might see one break apart.”

It’s too early in the year to see icebergs crumple regularly but the sound is a reminder. As politicians squabble over how to act on climate change, Greenland’s ice cap is melting, and faster than scientists had thought possible. [...]

Greenland, the world’s largest island, is mostly covered by an ice cap of about 624,000 cubic miles that accounts for a 10th of all the fresh water in the world.

Over the last 30 years, its melt zone has expanded by 30 percent.

“Some people are scared to discover the process is running faster than the models,” said Konrad Steffen, a glaciologist at University of Colorado at Boulder and a Greenland expert who serves on a U.S. government advisory committee on abrupt climate change.

“Faster than scientists had thought possible.” The earlier ironical quote from the last time we noted signs of accelerated climate change bears repeating. From Jurassic Park author and global warming skeptic Michael Crichton, our favorite chaotician, Ian Malcolm:

“Story of our species,” Malcolm said laughing. “Everybody knows it’s coming, but not so soon.”

Uh-huh.