LESSONS FROM THE ICE: NOTES FROM GREENLAND

NOTES FROM GREENLAND, 

        Where climate change is real

How Did I Get Here, and Why?

Elizabeth Kolbert often writes about environmental issues.  In October 2024 she wrote an article in the New Yorker  magazine called "When the Ice Melts," What the fate of the arctic means for the rest of the Earth."  After spending some time at 10,000 feet at Summit, the National Science Foundation station at the center of the ice cap, she visited Ilulissat, the "iceberg capital of the world."   That, I decided, I had to see. 

No Parkering, the Long Way 'Round to Greenland

Yes, that's "No Parking" to you.  

Greenland is a territory of Denmark, albeit an autonomos one, the fact that the ship I was boarding a ship was owned by a Danish company meant that I first had to fly to Copenhagen.

Among the many pleasures of the Tivoli Gardens

If I had to rate cities by personalities, I'd say New York was "aggressive" (who would disagree, really?) and Copenhagen "unassuming, restrained."  That's because everyone–cars, bicycles, pedestrians– obeys the traffic lights even when there's no traffic.  And as for decor, I think many might agree "restrained" is the word.  My hotel room was so "restrained" vis a vis decor it could have been a luxe prison cell.  Still, Copenhagen was nice.

What I didn't know about Greenland

Greenland has only 57,000 people in the entire country, and everyone lives on the edges of the country. Occupying the vast middle, 80% of the space, the Greenland ice sheet rises like a dome to an altitude of 10,000 feet. The weight of all that ice has shaped the landscape into a bowl, the highest peaks at Greenland's edges.   In the middle of that huge central expanse of ice is the Summit station run by the National Science Foundation.  Summit is the source of the deepest ice core that reached bedrock nearly 10,000 feet below in the 90's.  That ice and is the source of most of what the world knows about ice and the world's climate many million years ago to the present.  It's not good news.

The first people to study the ice from its approximate center were three German meteorologists in the early 1930's.  They survived by living and working under the ice.  So too did scientists from several countries and the US Army in the 1940's and 50's, building tunnels, laboratories and barracks–even a small nuclear reactor–under the ice.  Much material from those days is still there, buried by more ice and moving along with the rest of the ice, glacially, toward the sea. 

The ice sheet, seen in flight back to Copenhagen

Beauty of the Tundra

The plane from Copenhagen landed not far above the Arctic Circle at in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland's furthest inland town (!).  It lies at the end of a hundred-mile-long fjord.  Until the 1990's it was a US military base. That shows.  Volkswagen built a gravel road there in the late 1990's presumably to test cars, but it was never used for that and was abandoned by VW.  It is kept up because it was way to see the foot of the glacier (now to view the foot of the glacier as it has retreated) and gained fame as the longest road in Greenland.  To see the foot of the glacier now a lengthy hike is needed. 

The longest road in Greenland. In constant repair. 

Fall foliage

It wasn't hard to spot numerous reindeer along the road and white rabbits, but harder to see the shy (so we heard) musk oxen.  All are hunted here and elsewhere, including ptarmigan.  Fine woolen neck warmers and the like are made of musk ox hair.  In settlements visited north of here you find hanbd made items made of musk ox hair and also mittens and slippers made from sealskin, sometimes framed with polar bear fur.  Sales must be limited: none of the seal or polar bear products can be brought back to the US or a number of other countries.

It was more beautiful than I'd expected. 

The airport and former military base at Kangerlussuaq. Not qualifying as beautiful, but interesting.

Towns and Settlements

The ship head north visiting Sisimuit, Qeqertarsuaq, Disko Island, Uummanaq, Ilulissat, Itileq, and Niaqornat.(Q's are easy to deal with when you realize they are pronouned like the letter k, and that parts of words means things like bay, island, iceberg, or the like.)

Qeqertarsuag, Disko Island

Houses are often set precariously on rock. 

Wooden staircases and walkways connect houses not on actual streets.

The largest building in the harbor is for fish processing.  Major catches are halibut, cod, and shrimp. Fish are Greenland's biggest, and pretty much only, export.

These colors are probably just playful.  But nobody has a white house as it would be lost in the snow.

House colors were originally meant to designate what or who was inside:  Yellow indicated a doctor or medical service, red a government building, church or shop, blue for anything marine or fish-related, black for police, and so on.  Since many people, especially in the larger settlements have changed homes over time, the colors are no longer very reliable indicators.

 

Remote villages like Itilleq pictured directly above, still exist by harvesting seals and fish and hunting.  But Itilleq has an internet connection. The ship I was on visits there once a year and this was the day. Village children and a few adults were invited aboard for the afternoon. Imagine having a fancy hotel suddenly dropped into the middle of nowhere. 

In towns large enough to have a supermarket, like Sisimuit or Ilulissat, we were told not to buy anything:  everything for sale had been imported by ship.  If an item of hardware or food didn't appear on the order, it wouldn't be delivered and the town would need to go without until the next ship delivery. Reportedly this happened once with toilet paper.

In Uummannaq, a peat house, now museum, shows how people lived before the present wooden houses. These were occupied only in winter at a time when people were still nomadic. 

Even though there are more cars in the towns than I expected, not everyone can have a car.  But nearly everyone needs to have a boat.

 Signs of the Past: Dogs and Kayaks

In the summer dogs have nothing to do. They are kept on short rations because of their low activity level. 

This local man (above)  talked to us about his sled dogs, hunting with sled dogs, and what this is like today.  He talked about how he selects and trains the alpha dog, the only one that will get training, and how seals are hunted with sleds. He uses the sled dogs now mostly for tourist trips.  One of the Danish guides on the ship has dogs and participates in sled dog races. The breed is several thousand years old, and like the ponies of Iceland, is a protected breed. Once a sled dog is brought below the Arctic Circle it cannot be brought back. Nor can another breed of dog be imported.  

There are far fewer dogs these days than there once were. There are perhaps some 1,500 now in this town, but the number was once many times that. Once nearly every family had dogs. (It takes 15 to pull a sled.)  There are many reasons for this.  Other kinds of transportation exist now, of course, but there is another more telling reason.  The climate has changed.  The season for hunting and using dogs on the ice used to run from the end of November and December until April.  Now it runs from January to March. Using dogs is no longer worthwhile for such a short season.

These days sled dogs are mostly kept at the edges of town in the summer because they make so much noise.   

Instead of dogsleds kayaks were (are?) used for hunting seals when the water is open.  A local champion kayaker demonstrated techniques that are needed to survive under all possible conditions that could occur when hunting. His kayak, not made of hide like early kayaks nonetheless has the shape and weight of those kayaks–thin and sleek.  His oar, interestingly, is much thinner and lighter than the ones we use and he rarely uses it on both sides although it is also double-tipped. Yet his speed was amazing.  He demonstrated doing 180 degree turns, one while holding the oar, other turns holding it in different sometimes awkward positions, holding only a small stick (assuming a broken oar), the oar stuck under the kayak (almost impossibly difficult), no oar at all, and  turning over and over non-stop to emulate surviving heavy oncoming waves. Whew!

I Have to Say Something About Whales

Humpback whale, spouting

I haven't had much luck in the past on whale watches (saw not a one, ever), but this time I managed to see half a dozen, all humpbacks.  None breached, but they spouted, showed their flukes and flapped their flippers. All quicker than the eye. My eye, anyway.  

In a little museum there was a description of how local whale hunters once hunted that is more unsettling than the description of hunting Moby Dick.  After harpooning, and when the whale was nearly exhausted, one of the hunters would prepare to deliver the killing blow. First, a harpooner cut the tendons of the whale's flukes so it couldn't dive again. Wearing a "dry suit" made of sealskin, another harpooner would then jump onto the whale's back and crawl along it to deliver the death stroke. And this, in the Arctic Ocean.

Sealskin dry suit

I couldn't help but notice guns on the front of many fishing boats in harbors. They are used for harpooning. (See the one in the picture below.)

Passing under arches made from the jawbone of a bowhead whale are seen as "good luck."

The Ice Fjord -  What I Came For

A boardwalk outside of Ilulissat eads to to a view of the ice fjord.

The jam-up of icebergs is outflow from the Sermeq Kujalleq (formerly called Jakobshavns) glacier, the largest glacier outside of Antarctica, some 45 miles to the east.

The icebergs may hang around for as long as ten years or more. Most of them are grounded, that is, the 80 or 90 percent that is below the water rests on the sea floor.

I could go on.  There were icebergs in all configurations–a sculpture garden of ice.  Speaking of sculpture gardens, there was even a sculpture garden of rocks, basalt as I've never seen it before, on Disko Island.

Lessons From the Ice

The country is vulnerable given its tiny population.  Even its relationship with Denmark may not protect it well enough from outside threats.

Greenland's economy is also vulnerable with little to export, relying totally on imports.  Fishing stocks are currently reasonably healthy, but harvested halibut, for example, are smaller than they used to be.

Traditional hunting and probably other practices are already being affected by warmer weather, like the shortening of the season of ice from December-April to January-March. This affects the wildlife and habitat too.

Growing tourism could be a boon and help revive some traditions but brings its own changes to the people and the landscape. (A woman I talked to who sang traditional songs said her community has no interest in them, not even at festive gatherings.)