Greenland Is Melting ~ Environment Clean Generations

The trawler's crew could scarcely believe their eyes. They had seen icebergs before as they fished off the coast of Labrador, but never anything quite like this, what was described as "a dazzling white ice island five kilometres long and alive with mountains, valleys, brooks, waterfalls, ponds and seals."

A short video (embedded at the bottom of this blog post) that they took of the "floating ice city" was for a while trending on YouTube, and for good reason: Although the clip is short, it is long enough to demonstrate the immensity of the expanse of ice stretching in front of the camera.

Two years ago, I was communicating every day with another ship that was monitoring that same expanse of ice; but back then, the ice was where it was supposed to be - as part of Petermann Glacier in northwest Greenland, one of the northernmost glaciers in the world. The video at right shows the glacier still intact.

I was coordinating a tour of Greenland and the ice edge near Svalbard for Greenpeace, which was providing its ship Arctic Sunrise to researchers as a platform to study the impacts of a warming world on a changing Arctic. The tour began off Petermann, where the crew worked with a science team led by Jason Box of the Byrd Polar Research Center at The Ohio State University, who had been watching Petermann closely for years.

This video explains the work that Box and colleagues were doing on Petermann; but the big, sexy take-home messaging was that, as Box said, "Petermann glacier disintegration has been progressing since year 2000", a development that was expected to climax with the calving of an ice island approximately 100 square kilometers in area. Alas for us, despite several weeks of waiting, during which the researchers deployed time-lapse cameras and other monitoring equipment - and even, as depicted in the photograph at top, kayaked across part of it, towing ice-penetrating radar to measure the glacier's thickness - the large crack across the glacier did not split asunder and the ice island did not break away.

The following year, however, it did, sending a chunk of ice three times the size of Manhattan into Nares Strait, from where it has slowly been making its way south, calving smaller islands as it enters warmer waters, with those smaller pieces themselves breaking up into additional chunks. All the segments are continuing their southward journey, monitored closely by Canadian authorities. The ice island that the trawler encountered was off Black Tickle, Labrador.

The other day, I was talking via Skype with one of the crew who had been on board the Arctic Sunrise in 2009, who had gazed at the glacier, flown over it, and walked across it countless times. Even though we expected that ice island to break off at some point, and even though we knew that when it did so it would, because of its size, be far south before it melted, it was still quite sobering to see the video, two years later, of that same piece of ice so many hundreds of miles from where it had been.

"We could probably recognize landmarks, given a satellite image of it," he mused. "It kinda blows my mind."