BBC practice

With no end in sight to the coronavirus pandemic, many people can't wait for the year 2020 to end.

But with the coronavirus dominating the newspaper headlines, attention has moved away from an equality serious global issue which has quietly been getting worse- climate change. 

August 2020 saw the hottest temperature recorded anywhere in modern times- 54.4 degrees Ceisius in California's Death Vally. 

The same month also saw record amounts of ice melting inot the oceans around Greenland and the Arctic- huge icebergs breaking away from the egde of the ice sheet- a thick layer of ice which has covered a large area for a long time. 

Greenland's ice sheet is three times the size of Texas and almos 2 kilometer s thick. Locked inside is enough water to raise sea levels by 6 meters. 

But global heating and melting polar ice has many scientists asking whether it's now too late to stop. 

Have you have reached the point of no return? In this programe we'll looking at the effects of climate change on the Arctic and asking if it's too late to change. 

And learning some of the relaged vocabulary too. Now, Georgina, you mentioned record levels of ice melt in the North Pole but the scale is hard to take in. The amounts are so big they're measured in gigatonnes- that's a billion metric tonnes. 

Imagine a giant ice cube 1 kilometer by 1 kilometer by 1 kilometer. 

So my quiz question is this: how many gigatonnes of ice are now melting into the ocean every year? Is it:  a> 450 gigatonnes?

b> 500 gigatonnes? , or c> 550 gigatonnes?

I'll take a guess at b> 500 gigatonnes.