It is calving season in the Arctic. A flotilla of icebergs, some as jagged as fairytale castles and others as smooth as dinosaur eggs, calve from the ice sheet that smothers Greenland and sail down the fjords. The journey of these sculptures of ice from glaciers to ocean is eerily beautiful and utterly terrifying.
The wall of ice that rises behind Sermilik fjord stretches for 2,400km from north to south and covers 80 percent of this country. It has been frozen for 3 million years. Now it is melting, far faster than the climate models predicted and far more decisively than any political action to combat our changing climate. If the Greenland ice sheet disappeared, sea levels around the world would rise by 7m, as 10 percent of the world’s fresh water is frozen here.
This is also the season for science in Greenland. Glaciologists, seismologists and climatologists from around the world are landing on the ice sheet in helicopters, taking ice-breakers up its inaccessible coastline and measuring glaciers in a race against time to discover why the ice in Greenland is vanishing so much faster than expected.
Gordon Hamilton, a Scottish-born glaciologist from the University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute, is packing up equipment at his base camp in Tasiilaq, a tiny, remote east coast settlement only accessible by helicopter and where huskies howl all night.
With his spiky hair and ripped T-shirt, Hamilton could be a rugged glaciologist straight from central casting. Four years ago he hit upon the daring idea of landing on a moving glacier in a helicopter to measure its speed.
The glaciers of Greenland are the fat, restless fingers of its vast ice sheet, constantly moving, stretching down into fjords and pushing ice from the sheet into the ocean, in the form of melt water and icebergs.
Before their first expedition, Hamilton and his colleague, Leigh Stearns, from the University of Kansas, used satellite data to plan exactly where they would land on a glacier.
“When we arrived there was no glacier to be seen. It was way up the fjord,” he said. “We thought we’d made some stupid goof with the coordinates, but we were where we were supposed to be.”
It was the glacier that was in the wrong place. A vast expanse had melted away.
When Hamilton and Stearns processed their first measurements of the glacier’s speed, they thought they had made another mistake. They found it was marching forward at a greater pace than a glacier had ever been observed to flow before.
“We were blown away because we realized that the glaciers had accelerated not just by a little bit but by a lot,” he said.
The three glaciers they studied had abruptly increased the speed by which they were transmitting ice from the ice sheet into the ocean.
Standing before a glacier in Greenland as it calves icebergs into the dark waters of a cavernous fjord is to witness the raw power of a natural process we have accelerated but will now struggle to control.
Greenland’s glaciers make those in the Alps look like toys. Grubby white and blue crystal towers, cliffs and crevasses soar up from the water, dispatching millenniums of compacted snow in the shape of seals, water lilies and bishops’ miters.
I take a small boat to see the calving with Dines Mikaelsen, an Inuit guide, who in the winter will cross the ice sheet in his 5m sled pulled by 16 huskies.
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