Boomtowns and booming icebergs: a climate gold rush in Greenland
• In towns such as Ilulissat, global warming has brought bounty in fishing and tourism, but the melting ice has the locals worried too
Søren Stach Nielsen recently took up a challenging new job, as CEO of the Avannaata region in northwest Greenland. It is about as big as France but contains fewer than 11,000 people. He is based in Ilulissat —“iceberg” in Greenlandic — and huge icebergs wait in the ocean.
It’s one of the harshest environments inhabited by humans, and it is at the front line of global warming. “If you want to see climate change with your own eyes, this is the place you can go,” Nielsen says.
Temperatures in the region have risen more than twice as fast as the rest of the planet because the Arctic Sea ice is retreating. The thunder of icebergs breaking often rumbles through the village.
“If you are looking at it in a 20-year span, it is a kind of shock,” says Nielsen, pointing to shifts in the local economy. But it is not a climate-induced recession that makes his job difficult. His main challenge is one most other bureaucrats would gladly trade for: the town of Ilulissat is undergoing a rapid economic surge as it gets warmer.
“There are two boomtowns in Greenland: there is the capital Nuuk and there is Ilulissat,” says Nielsen. Fishing and hunting have been the main economic drivers of Ilulissat since it was established as a Danish trading post more than 250 years ago. Recently the fishing industry has surged, in part due to the retreating sea ice. On top of that, tourism has been booming too.
Nielsen says the situation resembles a gold rush. “It is like a Klondike scenario here,” he says, drawing parallels between the 4,500-person village and the Canadian region that is a byword for gold fever. “There are no unemployed in this town.”
The growth triggered by a warmer climate along with the improving accessibility of this icy land have put Greenland in the geopolitical spotlight, and brought attention from unwanted quarters. In August, US President Donald Trump said he wanted to buy Greenland, a self-governing territory of Denmark.
His suggestion was quickly rebuffed. But the incident highlighted how Greenland is one of the few places set to benefit from climate change.
The largest island in the world, Greenland is blanketed in an ice sheet about 1.5km deep that covers 81% of its land, an area bigger than the Eastern and Western Cape put together.
Warm air, retreating sea ice and a darkening of the ice surface caused by soot and algae are combining to heat up Greenland faster than scientists expected — and the melting of the ice sheet is accelerating.
A heatwave this summer brought record temperatures, contributing to days when 95% of its surface was melting. That could spell disaster for the rest of the world. The ice cap on Greenland contains enough water to raise sea levels by 7m if it all melted. (This would still take thousands of years, though.)
Already the rapid warming in the Arctic means Greenland is the single biggest contributor of meltwater to the rising ocean
— ahead of Antarctica and mountain glaciers — accounting for about one-quarter each year.
As climate scientists race to predict the pace of ice melting and sea-level rise, Greenland is seen as holding many answers. “Over the next five to 10 years, Greenland is going to be the dominant player for sea-level rise,” says Marco Tedesco, head of the cryospheric processes lab at City College in New York.
For low-lying areas such as Bangladesh, Vietnam, Florida and many small island nations, what happens in Greenland could determine their future.
Ilulissat doesn’t look like a boomtown at first glance. The short summer means that gravel covers most yards, gardens are impossible, and the melting permafrost has made the roads wavy and cracked. But there are signs of wealth: cars on the streets, skimobiles ready for winter and new fishing boats arriving in shipping containers.
The town’s third supermarket opened in the spring, and cafés and tourist shops are bustling. “Business is very good,” says Paneeraq Fleischer, a manager at the Pisiffik supermarket, just next to the football field.
She has one problem, though — the economic boom has led to a labour shortage. “In summer, we have a problem finding people who can work,” she says. Some cafés and supermarkets have started bringing in workers from the Philippines.
Local entrepreneurs such as Flemming Bisgaard, whose company rents out construction equipment, say they are struggling to keep up with demand. “This town is exploding in terms of tourists,” says Bisgaard. With 40,00050,000 visitors expected in 2019, on some days tourists outnumber residents.
Even the kindergarten has “no photo” signs, to prevent tourists taking pictures.
Not every area is growing. The number of Greenlandic sled dogs has declined steeply in recent years, largely due to the disappearing sea ice. There used to be about 15,000 in this town, many more than people, but now there are about 3,000.
“There are still fishermen, people going on dog sleds — but now it is a spare-time activity,” says Anja Reimer, director of the local museum. Sled dogs were traditionally an essential part of ice fishing during the winter, when hunters travel long distances on sleds across the frozen ocean. But as the sea ice retreats, that way of life is in decline.
Reimer and her husband gave up their sled dogs several years ago. “People used to live off the land, but now they have to have a job,” she sighs.
The growing number of boats — which can now be used for more of the year because there is less ice — has contributed to a fishing boom. The price of halibut, the main catch here, has tripled in the past decade. And fishermen can catch more than they used to.
The total annual fishing catch is worth about 500-million krone (R1.1bn) — a lot of money for a town of 4,500. The busy harbour is flanked by a halibut processing facility on one side and on the other a shrimp processing plant.
“You can only fit a few hundred kilos of fish on a sled. But you can fit two tons on a boat,” says Karl Sandgreen, a former fisherman. He now works in tourism, as a boat owner. Visitors are surprised to hear he welcomes global warming. “I’m OK with climate change, because it is getting warmer.”
In a place where winter lasts eight months a year, that does have advantages. Heating bills are lower, and supply ships can access the harbour for a longer time to restock grocery shelves.
Many residents welcome this. “They are not so sad about that, the climate change, they just have to make some changes to their way of life.”
The icebergs that make Ilulissat famous come from the huge Jakobshavn glacier, known as Sermeq Kujalleq in Greenlandic, one of the fastestmoving glaciers in the world. The glacier empties into a long fjord full of icebergs slowly making their way to the sea, the Ilulissat icefjord, which has been designated a Unesco World Heritage site.
Each year the volume of water that melts would be able to supply all of New York City.
The Jakobshavn glacier is one of the most studied in the world, because it flows so quickly. “When you stand there you can see the ice moving in front of your feet, it goes that fast,” says Konrad Steffen, a Swiss scientist who has been studying the ice cap near Ilulissat for more than three decades.
His research station, anchored into the ice, moves about 30cm a day as the ice flows, and speeds up to more than a metre a day in the summer. “I could lose my station,” he sighs.
The world has warmed about 1°C since preindustrial times, but this has not been evenly distributed — and the Arctic is warming fastest of all. Steffen’s research station has recorded a 2.8°C increase in average temperatures, just since 1990.
City College’s Tedesco sees the data from this summer as particularly worrying. “It seems like every year we are starting to see a new driver that is starting to push melting towards a new record.” Even the summit of the Greenland ice sheet, a spot that rises above freezing only every couple of hundred years, posted above-zero temperatures.
The Danish Meteorological Institute Says: “The changes that we see in Greenland overall are larger, and happening sooner, than what was projected,” says Eric Rignot, professor of earth system science at the University of California, Irvine.
The residents of Ilulissat have mixed feelings. “Maybe it is going the right way for our town, right now,” says Bisgaard. “But all in all, I wish it didn’t happen, because in all the Earth, it is not going the right way.”
Even the seemingly peaceful icebergs can crack apart violently without warning, sending shock waves through the water that turn into tsunamis on shore. One killed a tourist in Illulissat.
“They are like ticking time bombs,” Reimer says, pointing to the icebergs. “They could go off at any moment.”
For her, the changing climate demonstrates what Greenlanders have understood for a long time. “You know that nature rules here. You can’t rule nature,” she says. “The force is so strong, you can’t control it.”
OVER THE NEXT FIVE TO 10 YEARS, GREENLAND IS GOING TO BE THE DOMINANT PLAYER FOR SEA-LEVEL RISE
I’M OK WITH CLIMATE CHANGE, BECAUSE IT IS GETTING WARMER. JUST HAVE TO MAKE SOME CHANGES TO OUR WAY OF LIFE