Visiting the future in Greenland

It's melting faster than we think

The melting of Greenland’s ice sheet is central to global sea level rise, so I decided to visit last week. It was a life-changing trip for me. I began to understand much more fully why and how we are systematically underestimating the risks of sea level rise coming to our coasts in the next few decades.

 I got to hear from a few top-notch glaciologists while I was in Greenland, thanks to John Englander and his Rising Seas Institute enterprise, the organizers of the trip. Even though Greenland has far less ice to contribute than the Antarctic ice sheet, it is adding twice as much right now to the overall enterprise than its giant southern counterpart and is the largest single source of sea level rise. Not that it's a race you want to win, one glaciologist said wryly.

What the scientists had to say was striking, and it bears directly on risks along the US coastline: Right now, the predictive models being used by the IPCC and others may not be adequately accounting for complex interactions among rivers of meltwater, rising ocean temperatures, and the ice sheet. Observations of melting being made by scientists in Greenland match predictions that were supposed to come true 40 years from now, not this summer. We already know that the melting processes happening right now are irreversible on any human-relevant timescale.

The risk posed by the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet, which covers 80 percent of the island, is that even if GHG emissions ceased tomorrow it could add 5 feet or so of water to global sea levels all by itself, even without the help of Antarctica, over the next few decades. This melting could have cascading, compounding effects on other crucial climate tipping points that are physically nearby, like the AMOC and permafrost melting. Add the ice sheets of Antarctica to the mix, and you've got....a situation. That risk will show up on our shorelines.

We're not ready. And I wouldn't sign up for a 30-year mortgage on a house along the coast of the US. Keep in mind: Every day of your life, you depend on roads, sewage, power, and communications lines. All of that has to survive sea level rise, too. If one of those pieces of infrastructure fails, your house won't be functioning. The dynamism at work in Greenland’s ice poses a threat to these basic coastal systems.

Three days ago, I got into a small black speedboat in the tiny, dusty town of Illulisat, on the west coast of Greenland.

The Raven wove its way through a slew of huge icebergs, breaking through small chunks of ice and slush, to reach the even tinier town of Illuminaq, where I was stuffed fully-dressed (parka and all) into an enormous stiff-armed snowsuit. Another ride, this one in a faster open boat, took me to an isolated beach, where I put on goggles and was piled in the back of a rumbling, recalcitrant ATV for a dusty, jolting ride over the glacial moraine. Then another empty beach, this time fronting on a stupendous, blue-green fjord, where I boarded yet another speedboat. Ninety noisy bouncing-along-in-the-spray minutes later, the wrinkled, calving face of a glacier came into view. I was handed a sandwich—muskox was one of the choices, but I couldn't face that and stuck with salmon—in preparation for a climb up the side of the ice. I shuffled out of my heavy snowsuit. I'd needed it for the freezing-cold wind of the swift boat ride, but the walk to the glacier was going to be warm. 

Here's what I saw while I was sitting on a rock awkwardly practicing putting a pair of crampons over my recently-acquired hiking boots:

July 19, 2024 photo, by Peter Davies

That's a glacier. It's a frozen front door, one of 200 in Greenland, to an ice sheet that stretches across rocks and valleys for hundreds of miles. My puny encounter with this particular elephantine river of ice happened over the course of about an hour. I followed a guide along a narrow rocky beach and then up a scrum of icy grey boulders, putting my feet down firmly. I'd brought along a pink plastic water bottle—not a great idea—that dangled heavily from my left wrist, and I was determined not to fall. Around a bend to our right there was a slender rushing stream, a moulin, a torrent of meltwater running along and through the glacier. "Don't get near that," the guide warned. Here's the moulin from a safe distance.

A few minutes later, we were up behind the face of the glacier. Turning, I could see over the dimpled, rutted top of the glacier the sharply blue lake it faces. It was like being backstage on Mount Rushmore, peeking over the head of Theodore Roosevelt.

Here is a view from above of the path we followed to get there: the narrow tan strip in the middle of the picture is the beach (sandwich, crampons, remove heavy snowsuit). We walked from right to left along that beach and then up the rocks to the side of the glacier, where the wrinkly light grey ice meets the solid darker grey rock:

Flying over the same glacier we walked up the day before. Photo Peter Davies.

I had a number of encounters with ice in Greenland this past week, through long bright days and endlessly light-filled nights. There was a midnight boat-ride among icebergs, a helicopter ride up and over a different glacier and across part of the ice sheet, and a long sunny midday spent floating around in a boat next to yet another glacier.

But that short climb up the glacier three days ago brought me the closest, and helped me understand the "river of ice" descriptor that people always use. I saw what was around me as ripples in frozen water rather than folds, and I understood that the whole system of which the glacier is the expressive, visible boundary is under great, grinding pressure from heat. The glacier used to cover the darker grey rock in the photo above—that's the "trim line," I was told—and has retreated markedly over the last few years. But that's just part of the story.

Greenland's enormous ice sheet is a (mostly) white expanse covering 80 percent of the largest island on earth. It reaches 10,000 feet into the sky in places. Such a quantity of ice seems like a permanent, noble feature of the globe, a wonder. Now it's under assault from above and below, and melting at rates that are speeding ahead of the predictions made by current computer models. 

When warm summer air melts the surface of the ice sheet, the resulting meltwater drills holes down through the ice. That meltwater forms blue pools on the ice sheet's surface:

Meltwater ponds on the ice sheet east of Illulisat. Photo by Peter Davies.

The moulin I was warned away from was meltwater in another form, rushing downward to pool beneath and within the ice.  For the last ten years, we have known there is a landscape below the Greenland Ice Sheet that is covered in parts by meltwater from above and is connected to—and affected by—increasingly warm seawater from below. Meltwater shoots out from the base of the ice and then rises. It's less dense than the seawater because it doesn't contain salt. As it rises, it mixes with that warmer seawater, which rubs away at the bottom of the ice, melting it.

We hung around the front of glaciers this week both because of their majesty and because we were fascinated by their decay. When the front door has had enough, both from the pressure of melting behind and the crush of meltwater rivers within and below it, it gives way and a piece of it falls off. A whoop goes up. For sea level rise purposes, the transition that matters is the moment when ice on land becomes ice or meltwater injected into a body of water—the moment marked by that whoop.

Did you catch that on film? someone says. That's the sight of an iceberg being formed, a process glaciologists call calving. 

Here is a picture of the calving face of Jakobshavn, the most "productive" of Greenland's glaciers, and the milky white river of ice it is spawning right now. The picture was taken from a helicopter; so you can see the height of this glacier, I've superimposed the Notre Dame Cathedral on the image. The slight spray in the middle is calving.

(Watch the extraordinary documentary from 2012, "Chasing Ice," in which dedicated videographers witnessed nearly two cubic miles of ice calving off Jakobshavn. You won’t regret it.)

Icebergs (technically, pieces of ice standing more than 16 feet above the water and more than about 100 feet wide) flow down from the glacier front to the sea, melting steadily along the way. People have their pictures taken in front of them. Someday these images will be viewed through an unbearable scrim of melancholy, and they will seem to us like photos of grinning hunters who have conquered a buffalo. I saw many sweaty, disheveled remnants of icebergs this past week, slumping their way toward oblivion. 

Elderly iceberg.

I knew before I went that the Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the world. But I really felt that when I was there. Greenland was going through a “heat surge.” It was difficult to sleep because it was hot as well as bright, and air conditioning has not yet come to the Arctic.

This trip will haunt me. It is obvious that Greenland is hoping to attract enormous numbers of eco-tourists, with two new huge airports opening over the next couple of years. There is real tension between the powerful Danish management of the country and the desires for self-determination and independence of the Inuit people, and between those forces and the national security priorities of both the US and China, not to mention Russia. It's a cauldron, a place under pressure, a place where rivers of ice make the rumpled, folding nature of time visible to human eyes. 

I'm glad I got to visit this summer, and I'm glad to be the age I am: I feel lucky to have been alive during a time just before the ongoing, cataclysmic effects of heat on our planet became so vividly apparent.

I'd say "don't visit," but that's both unfair and impossible. What's happening in Greenland will roll forward no matter what. But we should, at least, get a better handle on the melting processes the glaciologists are seeing. 

Illulisat, 1:30am. Photo Peter Davies.