Earth’s future written in big melt
Greenland
This is where Earth’s refrigerator door is left open, where glaciers dwindle and seas begin to rise.
New York University air and ocean scientist David Holland, who is tracking what’s happening in Greenland from both above and below, calls it ‘‘the end of the planet’’.
He is referring to geography more than the future. Yet in many ways, this place is where the planet’s warmer and watery future is being written.
It is so warm here, just inside the Arctic Circle, that on an August day, coats are left on the ground and Holland and his colleagues can work on the watery melting ice without gloves. In one of the closest towns, Kulusuk, the morning temperature reached a balmy 10.7C.
The ice Holland is standing on is thousands of years old. It will be gone within a year or two, adding yet more water to rising seas worldwide.
The northern summer this year is hitting Greenland hard with record-shattering heat and extreme melt. By the end of the season, about 400 billion tonnes of ice – maybe more – will have melted or calved off Greenland’s giant ice sheet, scientists estimate. That’s enough water to flood Greece about 35cm deep.
In just the five days from July 31 to August 3, more than 53 billion tonnes melted from the surface. That’s over 40 billion tonnes more than the average for this time of year.
And that doesn’t even count the huge calving events or the warm water eating away at the glaciers from below, which may be a huge factor.
One of the places hit hardest is on the southeastern edge of the giant frozen island: Helheim, one of Greenland’s fastest-retreating glaciers, has shrunk about 10km since 2005.
Several scientists, such as Nasa oceanographer Josh Willis, who is studying melting ice from above, say what is happening is a combination of man-made climate change and natural but weird weather patterns.
Greenland’s glaciers shrink in summer and grow in winter, but nothing like they have this year.
Summit Station, a research camp nearly 3200m high and far north, warmed to above freezing twice this year for a record total of 16.5 hours. Before this year, the station was above zero for only 6.5 hours in 2012, once in 1889, and also in the Middle Ages.
This year is coming near but not quite passing the extreme summer of 2012, Greenland’s worst year in modern history for melting, scientists say.
‘‘It takes a really long time to grow an ice sheet, thousands and thousands of years, but they can be broken up or destroyed quite rapidly,’’ Holland says.
Holland, like Willis, suspects that warm, salty water that comes in part from the Gulf Stream in North America is playing a bigger role than previously thought in melting Greenland’s ice. If that’s the case, it’s probably bad news for the planet, because it means faster and more melting and higher sea level rise.
Willis says that by 2100, Greenland alone could cause more than a metre of sea level rise. So it’s crucial to know how much of a role the air above and the water below play.
‘‘We like it because we like to have a summer,’’ says Justus Paulsen, mayor of tiny Kulusuk, about a 40-minute helicopter ride away.
But Holland looks out at Helheim glacier from his base camp and sees the bigger picture. And it’s not good, he says. Not for Greenland. Not for Earth as a whole.
‘‘It’s kind of nice to have a planet with glaciers around,’’ he says. –AP
‘‘[Ice sheets] can be broken up or destroyed quite rapidly.’’ David Holland, scientist