Greenland // Current

Floods under Antarctic ice speed glaciers into sea: study

Scientists unveiled Sunday the first direct evidence that massive floods deep below Antarctica's ice cover are... more

JanforGore
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Nuumioq

Check out the beautiful trailer to Mikisog Lynge's film, Nuumioq, as featured in I Heart Global Warming. Mikisoq and his... more

DavidCasey
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I Heart Global Warming

Global warming is having a greater impact in the Arctic than anywhere else in the world. Greenland, the cold, harsh land that... more

Adam_Yamaguchi
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I Heart Global Warming Promo

Greenland loves the benefits of Climate Change. Greenland is thawing. While the melting ice sheet on the world's largest... more

Adam_Yamaguchi
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Vanguard Trailer: I Heart Global Warming

Greenland loves the benefits of Climate Change. Greenland is thawing. While the melting ice sheet on the world's largest... more

Adam_Yamaguchi
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Country Fast Facts: Greenland

Tell us why this is interesting(CBS)Greenland, the world's largest island, is about 81% ice-capped. Vikings reached the... more

starr111
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Greenland: roar of melting glacier sounds climate change alarm

When are we going to hear the roar of the American people demanding Washington Dc wake the hell up and stop touting some bogus 80%... more

JanforGore
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NASA deploys rubber duckies to research global warming

Researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory have released 90 rubber ducks into Greenland's Jakobshavn glacier in an... more

abbym0308
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Greenland seeks whaling breakaway

Greenland is attempting to remove its whale hunt from the jurisdiction of the International Whaling Commission (IWC), BBC News has... more

Manatee_man
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Minister wants Greenland out of IWC

The Minister for Fishing and Hunting, Finn Karlsen, has asked Denmark's foreign minister Per Stig Møller to... more

jefftego
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Sea level rises could far exceed IPCC estimates: scientists

Could our coastlines disappear underwater much sooner than we think? The controversial view that sea levels could rise at a rate of more than 1 metre per century has found support from a new study of a long-melted ice sheet.

In reconstructing the events at the end of the last ice age, Anders Carlson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and colleagues found that the Laurentide ice sheet, which covered most of North America between 95,000 and 7000 years ago, rapidly disintegrated.

The researchers began by studying beryllium isotopes in rocks to determine how the outer edges of the two final chunks of the Laurentide ice sheet retreated. They found that the ice retreated rapidly between 9000 and 8500 years ago, stabilised, and then made its final rapid retreat between 7600 and 6800 years ago.

The team calculated the volume of water that would have been released in each of these melting stages, and the rate at which it must have raised sea levels. They concluded that levels would have climbed 1.3 metres per century in the earlier period, and 0.7 metres per century in the final melt.

Carlson then used a sophisticated computer model – one that is used to forecast future climate change – to check the results. The model predicted an average sea level rise of 1.3 metres per century.

Different times
"The forces that led to the demise of the Laurentide ice sheet in a very rapid way are comparable to the forces the same computer models predict we will experience this century if we do not rapidly curb greenhouse gas emissions," says Gavin Schmidt of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who collaborated with Carlson on the study.

For Mark Siddall of the University of Bristol, UK, and Michael Kaplan of the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory in New York, however, there remain many differences between what happened nearly 10,000 years ago and the climate change Earth is currently experiencing.

"To what extent this dynamic response of the Laurentide ice sheet to past temperature change can be considered analogous to present and future reduction of the Greenland ice sheet remains unresolved," they say in an associated commentary. "But their work suggests that future reductions of the Greenland ice sheet on the order of one metre per century are not out of the question."

If Carlson's estimates are correct, they show that 2007 predictions made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – a sea-level rise of between 18 centimetres and 59 cm by 2100 – are very conservative, as the IPCC acknowledged at the time.

Millions at risk
Sea-level rises of at least a metre per century were also predicted by the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, James Hansen. Hansen believes that our climate will soon hit tipping points – points of no return – beyond which the ice sheets will rapidly disintegrate.

Carlson says his team's findings are proof that large ice sheets can disintegrate very rapidly. What's more, he says the forces that caused the Laurentide ice sheet to disintegrate are equivalent to the ones that threaten the Greenland ice sheet today.
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Will the US and other industrialized nations then step up to the plate in Copenhagen next year? Will the US Congress do so as well? The way I feel today I would say it would have to take Greenland falling into the ocean before that happens. How irresponsible of them to not be making this the priority issue it must be.Could our coastlines disappear underwater much sooner than we think? The controversial view that sea levels could rise at a rate... more

JanforGore
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3 months ago

US Cold War waste irks Greenland

Pentagon refuses to clean up toxic military bases, saying it would set a bad precedent.

lecoke
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6 responses

3 months ago

Greenland saying goodbye to Petermann Glacier

Scientific data and satellite images have shown that yet another glacier is vanishing. Recent findings by the Byrd Polar Research... more

PajamaDan
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26 responses

3 months ago

Greenland glacier breakup suggests imminent disintegration

New satellite images reveal that a massive ice chunk recently broken away from one of Greenland's glaciers, which researchers... more

toshiba
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3 months ago

Flush With Energy

THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, The New York Times Op-Ed, August 10, 2008

Copenhagen

The Arctic Hotel in Ilulissat, Greenland, is a charming little place on the West Coast, but no one would ever confuse it for a Four Seasons — maybe a One Seasons. But when my wife and I walked back to our room after dinner the other night and turned down our dim hallway, the hall light went on. It was triggered by an energy-saving motion detector. Our toilet even had two different flushing powers depending on — how do I say this delicately — what exactly you’re flushing. A two-gear toilet! I’ve never found any of this at an American hotel. Oh, if only we could be as energy efficient as Greenland!

A day later, I flew back to Denmark. After appointments here in Copenhagen, I was riding in a car back to my hotel at the 6 p.m. rush hour. And boy, you knew it was rush hour because 50% of the traffic in every intersection was bicycles. That is roughly the percentage of Danes who use two-wheelers to go to and from work or school every day here. If I lived in a city that had dedicated bike lanes everywhere, including one to the airport, I’d go to work that way, too. It means less traffic, less pollution and less obesity.

What was most impressive about this day, though, was that it was raining. No matter. The Danes simply donned rain jackets and pants for biking. If only we could be as energy smart as Denmark!

Unlike America, Denmark, which was so badly hammered by the 1973 Arab oil embargo that it banned all Sunday driving for a while, responded to that crisis in such a sustained, focused and systematic way that today it is energy independent. (And it didn’t happen by Danish politicians making their people stupid by telling them the solution was simply more offshore drilling.)

What was the trick? To be sure, Denmark is much smaller than us and was lucky to discover some oil in the North Sea. But despite that, Danes imposed on themselves a set of gasoline taxes, CO2 taxes and building-and-appliance efficiency standards that allowed them to grow their economy — while barely growing their energy consumption — and gave birth to a Danish clean-power industry that is one of the most competitive in the world today. Denmark today gets nearly 20% of its electricity from wind. America? About 1%.

And did Danes suffer from their government shaping the market with energy taxes to stimulate innovations in clean power? In one word, said Connie Hedegaard, Denmark’s minister of climate and energy: “No.” It just forced them to innovate more — like the way Danes recycle waste heat from their coal-fired power plants and use it for home heating and hot water, or the way they incinerate their trash in central stations to provide home heating. (There are virtually no landfills here.)

There is little whining here about Denmark having $10-a-gallon gasoline because of high energy taxes. The shaping of the market with high energy standards and taxes on fossil fuels by the Danish government has actually had “a positive impact on job creation,” added Hedegaard. “For example, the wind industry — it was nothing in the 1970s. Today, one-third of all terrestrial wind turbines in the world come from Denmark.” In the last 10 years, Denmark’s exports of energy efficiency products have tripled. Energy technology exports rose 8% in 2007 to more than $10.5 billion in 2006, compared with a 2% rise in 2007 for Danish exports as a whole.

“It is one of our fastest-growing export areas,” said Hedegaard. It is one reason that unemployment in Denmark today is 1.6%. In 1973, said Hedegaard, “we got 99% of our energy from the Middle East. Today it is zero.”

THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, The New York Times Op-Ed, August 10, 2008 Copenhagen The Arctic Hotel in Ilulissat, Greenland, is a... more

MeganMcKenzie
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3 months ago

Climate change in action in Greenland

You can't see climate change in action, much to the disappointment of photographers and magazine art directors. Warming is a function of time, and we see it only as time passes. Years go by, we add more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, temperatures rise, glaciers retreat and deserts expand. One of the essential facts about climate science is that unlike, say, weather forecasting, the farther ahead we look into the future, the more confident we can be of our predictions. So we know that burning enough fossil fuel to raise the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere to 550 parts per million twice preindustrial levels will virtually guarantee a temperature increase of at least 3 F, with all the consequences that will carry. By contrast, we can't look at a hurricane, or at an iceberg melting, and say, "Yes, this is global warming, and we did this." Climate change is change, and change happens over time.

In some places of the world, that change is happening more quickly than in others, so quickly that our "fast-thinking human mind," as the University of Copenhagen geologist Minik Rosing says, can almost catch it. One of those places is the coastal town of Ilulissat, the last stop on our climate tour of Greenland. It's home to the Ilulissat ice fjord, a basin-shaped wound in the rocky coast, through which the massive Sermeq Kujalleq glacier churns toward the sea. As the glacier moves at the hardly glacial speed of over 100 ft. a day the ice melts and cracks into cathedrals of blue and white that bob in the harbor beyond the isfledsbanken, or iceberg bank. Sermeq Kujalleq, which is fed by the 1.8 million cubic miles of solid ice that cover central Greenland, is the most productive glacier on the island, calving icebergs with dramatic regularity. The iceberg that sank the Titanic may well have come from Sermeq, and looking upon Ilulissat's harbor, choked with sheer cliffs of ice that dwarf even the stately cruise liners, I can believe it.

We take a boat out for a tour amid the ice. In the Arctic summer Ilulissat is cool but not cold, maybe 65 F, but as we near the ice fjord, the temperature drops, as if cold is emanating from the icebergs themselves. As we leave the port, at first we encounter a slurry of ice in the water, which is sapphire blue because of the cold. But soon we near the giants, and they are easily over 100 ft. tall and that's just above the water. (More than 80% of an iceberg's mass is beneath the surface, and the water in Ilulissat's port is more than a mile deep.) We can't get too close to the big icebergs as they melt all the time in the salty sea, without warning, they can crack and cave in, loosing waves big enough to topple or even crush small boats. But even from a distance, they are breathtaking: natural cathedrals of white, lined by unmappable crevices, leaking pure glacial meltwater that pours into the sea as if from a fountain. It's easy to see why UNESCO made Ilulissat a World Heritage site and why tourist numbers have been growing steadily.

But we're not here as tourists. After the boat docks, our group boards a helicopter piloted by a sprite of a Greenlandic woman for a tour of the fjord and glacier, which is retreating fast. Before we leave, we are shown a map of the glacier. As pressure from the central ice cap builds up behind the glacier, it pushes its way to the sea through the ice fjord. The glacier ends where melting causes icebergs to calve off, and we see that each year the glacier has retreated farther and farther away from the sea. Sermeq Kujalleq is shrinking so fast (on a geological scale) that we can almost see it.

This is global warming as close as we can get to it in action. There's no doubt here, no room for skeptics: temperatures have warmed in Greenland, and as they have warmed, the ice has melted. It is as simple as that.You can't see climate change in action, much to the disappointment of photographers and magazine art directors. Warming is a... more