Not-So-Green-Land
The “melting of global ice caps” has been dragged through mass media up to the point at which one could no longer hear it. But ice is not just ice, and Greenland is not just an island — as my excursion to 81 degrees North has clearly shown. The grace of a hungry polar bear, the might of a century-old iceberg and the sharp mountaintops of Spitsbergen have not only revealed unparalleled natural beauty, but an ecosphere more vital to the survival of humanity than any other.
Role Play
The notion of “melting ice” in our planet’s polar regions has long been synonymous with climate change — and the consequences that await us in the near future. But common knowledge on the matter often doesn’t go further than a connection to generally rising sea levels. A slight scratch on the surface of the “melting ice” occurrence reveals a highly fragile and complex ecosystem of biophysical interactions at play, whose cataclysmic influence on environments across the globe cannot be understated — and our Polar regions in the middle of it.
I have recently been fortunate to spend three weeks in the Arctic — across mainland Norway, Svalbard, Greenland and Iceland — and witness the unfathomable uniqueness of this mostly deserted land. Back on the continent, it has become an evident imperative for me to highlight what I learned and with it, the crucial role this region plays — both in expected and unexpected ways — in shaping the trajectory of humanity.
Setting the Scene
It’s a little-known fact that Arctic temperatures, in light of global warming, have not only been rising, but rising faster than any other place on our planet throughout the past decades. Whilst the global average temperature has warmed by roughly 0.8 degrees Celsius since 1979, Arctic regions measured a staggering 3 degrees Celsius instead. The reason behind this exceptionality can be found in a phenomenon labelled as “Arctic amplification”, a self-reinforcing process in which air temperature rise causes white, reflective ice surfaces to disappear, which, in turn, causes air temperatures to rise further. The culprit in this story is the surface beneath the ice — whereas the reflective nature of an ice sheet could absorb up to two-thirds of the sun’s radiation, keeping the warming effect of the sunlight at bay, the necessarily darker surface underneath absorbs most all of it, and, in turn, exacerbates ice melt through additional warming of air temperatures.
Whilst melting ice per se is no cause for worry — ice melts in Summer and freezes up again in Winter in most parts of the world -, it warrants concern when it’s doing so at a faster-than-normal pace. Even more so when such pace means that it can’t regrow to make up for its loss earlier in the year — and warmer periods for a longer part of the year seem to make a perfect recipe for that.
Unlike the name suggests, Antarctic regions can also suffer from an amplification effect similar to the one in the North, but as most of the Antarctic ice sits on top of land — such as glaciers do — and most land surfaces being “brighter” than the dark ocean underneath sea ice, this effect is materially less pronounced. Aside from particular ocean current patterns, this explains the vast difference in warming behaviour between the South Pole and its Northern counterpart.
The Main Character
Interestingly, the above-mentioned inter-regional differences extend to notable intra-regional variations within the Northern Arctic region — and at the centre of is Greenland. Home to the world’s second-largest ice sheet — at times up to 3km thick -, the island keeps roughly 8% of all of Earth’s freshwater locked up in it and is exposed to what is believed the highest magnitude in sensitivity towards “Arctic amplification”, both on land and sea ice, resulting in a loss of mass twice as fast as its bigger brother, the Antarctic ice sheet.
The particularity of the “Arctic amplification” at play on and around Greenland is an intricate interplay of warming air and oceans, whereby melting land ice uncovers darker, dirtier and more absorbing ice and the resulting increase in meltwater flowing down through glacial ice tunnels further causes the rim of the ice sheet to become porous and with it, quicker to melt under the influence of warmer seawater. The South of Greenland, bordering warming ocean currents, is especially affected by this process.
The Climax
As a consequence, at about 10 million Olympic swimming pools a year, the island’s ice sheet is disappearing at a considerably faster-than-normal pace — more than five trillion tons of ice have disappeared since the early 2000s alone. And if history shall serve as any indication of what’s to come, then a recent finding from a team of researchers from the University of Vermont and Utah State University boosts everything but confidence. Their study debunked the widespread belief that the Arctic wasn’t ice-free for as much as the past 2.5mn years and indicated that Greenland was, in fact, an ice-free tundra little more than 416’000 years ago. What’s striking is that carbon dioxide concentration levels of just 280 parts per million were sufficient to cause global warming to make the island’s entire ice sheet disappear — at the current level of 420 parts per million, one can only assume that, unless any major changes in direction, the current trajectory points towards a future not too dissimilar to half a million years ago.
This all doesn’t seem worth further mentioning from the planet’s perspective (leaving biodiversity aside) — after all, it moves through warmer and colder periods in 100’000-year-supercycles and the current warming periods, for human-induced reasons, simply seems to be setting itself in slightly faster than in the past. But the disappearance of Greenland’s ice sheet and the therewith resulting rise in sea levels of up to 7.3 metersmeans for humanity is an entirely different story.
It is nothing short of reasonable to expect catastrophic scenarios for coastal regions, infrastructure and most population centres across the globe. First incremental signs of what Arctic-melt-induced sea level rise can manifest itself in are already reflected in coastal regions seeing oceanic saltwater seeping into underground water reserves, rendering crops poisoned, killing forests and exacerbating natural disasters. Even Hurricane Sandy is said to have affected an additional 70’000 people and caused a further $8bn in costs solely due to rising sea levels.
The Conclusion
The melting of Greenlandic and Arctic ice is a proven fact, and the various consequences sprouting from it are an existential wall coming towards humankind. But possible solutions to this crisis go beyond the commonly conceived “simply cutting of global GHG emissions” — even if all GHG emissions were managed to be reduced to zero by the end of the 2020s, the total sea level rise resulting from ongoing melting is still expected to put societies all across the global under significant duress.
What needs to be stopped is one of humanity’s most fundamental traits — opportunism. Whereas academia has rang the alarm bell for the Arctic ice melt for years already, others started to see much to gain from a soon-to-be ice-free Polar region in the immediate future. Bordering nations have begun to squander for the plentiful natural resources that the surface beneath the ice holds — much of it on Russian soil — whilst shipping giant Maersk had its first freight ship cross the Northern Sea Route, cutting 15 days off its alternative route through the Southern Hemisphere. What could follow from this for the delicate Arctic flora and fauna is painful to imagine. On the hunt for the next “profit gig”, humanity is willing to disrupt vital ecosystems, act against global pledges for carbon neutrality and intervene in mechanisms of biodiversity that have existed for longer than humans themselves. And whilst major contenders for “Arctic business” shun away from doing activity up north for the time being, it remains to be seen for just how long this abstinence will last. In the absence of business common sense, what is left to do for us “commoners” is to make our voice heard through other means — through our votes (sometimes more, sometimes less successfully), through our savings and through our recreational choices.
