Greenland culture and climate on the edge
By Fiona Harvey
Published: October 30 2009 13:33 | Last updated: October 30 2009 13:33
Disko Bay lay glinting with ice on the bright afternoon we sailed in. Bergs as big as buses floated among others the size of houses. But houses from another world – these were castles and fairy grottoes, crazy monumental statues sculpted into fantastical shapes by the sea, the wind and the pressure of centuries of falling snow. Pools of unearthly blue water shimmered on their surfaces. One iceberg with five straight sides – on the surface, an exact cube – drifted slowly, slowly by, its geometry bewitching. These were just the beginning. Further on were floating mountains, ice cliffs hundreds of metres tall, marching forth from the mouth of the glacier that reaches the sea at Disko Bay. Most of these break up or are worn down before they get here, but some last for years, as huge and menacing as when they were calved from the Jakobshavn Isbrae, the most productive glacier in the northern hemisphere. Every year, 35 billion tonnes of ice break free of the Greenland ice sheet here. Only the mammoth glaciers of Antarctica can compare. The Isbrae – also known as Sermeq Kujalleq – moves at 40m a day. For glaciers, this is pretty quick. Glaciers have always made their way to the sea. Snow falls on the vast Greenland ice sheet – this is by far the world’s biggest island – and the weight pushes out the ice at the edges. But the remarkable thing about the Jakobshavn Isbrae – and nearly all of Greenland’s glaciers, and most of the glaciers in the world – is how fast those outward waves are flowing now. In 2002, when researchers measured the Jakobshavn Isbrae, which drains 6.5 per cent of the Greenland ice sheet, it was moving only half as quickly as it is today, and pouring only half the present volume of ice into the fjord. The earliest known maps of this glacier date from the 1850s, but observations of it have intensified since the 1950s. They track the marked acceleration of the ice over recent decades, and show its speed increasing dramatically in the past few years. The Hellheim glacier, draining 4 per cent of the Greenland ice sheet, tells a similar story. Its speed increased from 8km a year in 2000 to 11km a year in 2005, and has since accelerated. The reason the glaciers are speeding up is simple: Greenland is getting warmer. Jacqueline McGlade, director of the European Environment Agency, says: “The amount of ice that is being lost is far more than we thought. Greenland is warming faster than the computer models predicted, and that is a worry.” The Arctic has warmed at three times the rate of the rest of the world in the past 100 years, and temperatures continue to rise. Ola Johannessen, chief of Norway’s Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Centre, has worked on ice for more than 30 years. He has never seen anything like the current situation. “There is no doubt that what we are seeing is the result of global warming. The glaciers are moving faster. Ice is being lost from the Greenland ice sheet, and that will raise sea levels.” …
