The Devastating Beauty Of Greenland's Melting Ice

Greenland is melting. (AP Photo/David Goldman) The autonomous Danish island, located in the Arctic, is 80 percent ice. Its massive sheet of frozen water — about 660,000 square miles across (roughly the size of Alaska) and two miles thick at its highest point — is the second largest body of ice in the world, built up from snowfall dating back to the last ice age, some 115,000 years ago. It's so massive, in fact, that the ice sheet "creates its own weather," The New Yorker reports.