In April, the EU released its European State of the Climate 2025 Report. Greenland's ice sheet, it announced, lost 139 gigatons during the 2024-25 measurement year — roughly 1.5 times all the ice stored in every glacier in the European Alps combined — and raised global sea levels by 0.4 millimeters. Headlines wrote themselves.
Then the provisional data for the 2025-26 season came in.
The ice grew. Not stabilized — grew. By 6 gigatons, according to Polar Portal, the European monitoring system that tracks the ice sheet year-round. Summer melt came in roughly 200 gigatons below normal levels. Cold, snowy weather held into July.
The last time that happened was 1995-96. Thirty years ago.
The EU report had identified 2024-25 as "the 29th consecutive year of net mass loss" from the Greenland ice sheet. The 2025-26 season would have made it 30. Instead, it broke the streak.
Coverage of the break: mostly silence.
The long-term loss numbers are real. Total ice lost since 1972 stands at 5,747 gigatons across nearly five decades of satellite measurement. But the historical record extends further than satellite imagery. A peer-reviewed dataset tracking Greenland's ice balance back to 1840 shows that melting began around 1900. Between 1920 and 1970 — when global CO2 emissions were a fraction of current levels — annual ice loss ran at rates comparable to recent decades. The 1970s and 1980s brought a sharp temperature decline and a pause in net melt.
The variation long predates the narrative.
At the current long-term average loss rate, it would take an estimated 27,000 years for the Greenland ice sheet to fully disappear. The sheet has already survived 10,000 years of post-glacial warming intact. The annual margin of error on ice calculations runs around 100 gigatons — meaning a 6-gigaton gain and a 139-gigaton loss both fall within the statistical noise range.
One generated wall-to-wall coverage. The other is sitting in provisional data bulletins that major outlets have not touched.
The "irreversible collapse" of the Greenland ice sheet is the justification for trillions of dollars in green energy mandates, carbon taxes, EV subsidies, and regulatory overhaul. A year where the ice grew for the first time since 1996 does not fit inside that argument.
So it doesn't make the news.
The data moves in both directions. The coverage only moves in one.