The Thunderous Sounds of the Arctic Melting

June 7, 2007

ATOP Greenland's Suicide Cliff, from which old Inuit women used to hurl themselves when they felt they had become a burden to their community, a crack and a thud like thunder pierce the air.

"We don't have thunder here. But I know it from movies," says Ilulissat nurse Vilhelmina Nathanielsen, while walking through the melting snow. "It's the ice cracking inside the icebergs. If we're lucky we might see one break apart."

It's too early in the year to see icebergs crumple regularly, but the sound is a reminder.

As politicians squabble over how to act on climate change, Greenland's icecap is melting faster than scientists had thought possible.

A new island in East Greenland is a clear sign of how the place is changing. It was dubbed Warming Island by US explorer Dennis Schmitt when he found in 2005 that it had emerged from beneath the ice.

If the icecap melts entirely, oceans would rise by seven metres. A total meltdown would take centuries, but global warming — which climate experts blame mainly on human use of fossil fuels — is heating the Arctic faster than anywhere else on Earth.

Greenland, the world's largest island, is mostly covered by an icecap of about 2.6 million cubic kilometres which accounts for a 10th of all the fresh water in the world.

Over the past 30 years, its melt zone has expanded by 30 per cent. Now the cap loses 100 to 150 cubic kilometres of ice every year — more than all the ice in the Alps.

"Some people are scared to discover the process is running faster than the models," said Konrad Steffen, a glaciologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a Greenland expert who serves on a US Government advisory committee on abrupt climate change.

In the past 15 years, winter temperatures have risen about five degrees on the cap, while spring and autumn temperatures increased about three degrees.
Swiss-born Dr Steffen is one of dozens of scientists who have peppered the Greenland icecap with instruments to measure temperature, snowfall and the movement, thickness and melting of the ice.

The more the surface melts, the faster the ice sheet moves towards the ocean. The glacier that Swiss Camp rests on has doubled its speed to about 15 kilometres a year in the past 12 years, while its tongue retreated 10 kilometres into the fjord.

"It is scary," Dr Steffen said. "This is only Greenland. But Antarctica and glaciers around the world are responding as well."

The rush of new water leaves scientists with crucial questions about how much sea levels could rise and whether the system of ocean currents that ensures Western Europe's mild winters could shut down.

If you're a fisherman in Greenland, however, global warming is doing wonders for your business because the harbour no longer freezes over.

Warmer weather also boosts tourism, a source of big development hopes for the 56,000 mostly Inuit inhabitants of Greenland, a self-governing territory of Denmark. Hoping to lure American visitors, Air Greenland launched a direct flight from Baltimore last month. One commentator, noting the carbon dioxide emissions such travel would create, has called that "eco-suicide tourism".

REUTERS


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