Greenland Revisited: Sept 2019 – Part 1
Last week was my sixth trip to Greenland. The seasons change so suddenly there, that it can be hard to discern what is changing with the years and what is merely a different season of the year. Our Fact-Finding team landed on Tuesday, September 8. Unexpectedly it was the first snowfall of the season. Though not officially winter, this was not summer.
The seasons can change sharply there. With the rapidly warming Arctic, part of climate change, it is hard to know what to expect from one year to another. My colleague Dr. Robert “Bob” Corell was there just two weeks prior, in late August. The glaciers were melting with water flowing down the giant tubular holes in the ice, the “moulins.”
Based on my prior experience and this being a record year for warming in the Arctic, I expected the melting to still be occurring by the second week of September. In that regard, we were disappointed. There was no meltwater. Everything was frozen solid. Yet icebergs were still calving. And the product of this summer’s record melting was still clogging the fjords on the way to sea. In fact, there were more mega icebergs than ever.
That’s one of the contradictions of the Arctic that surprises people. As it melts faster and faster, more icebergs are calved or spawned. That creates hazzards to shipping which is increasing as freighters, LNG tankers, and cruise ships take advance of the melting Arctic Ocean. That will likely continue throughout this century.
Having just returned I need to keep this message brief. Next week, I will continue the report from Greenland when I have had a little more time to process what we saw and learned. I will describe some of the private briefings we received and share some of the impressions by members of my group. For now, I will share some images of the icebergs. One might think of this as the largest outdoor sculpture exhibit in the world. The shapes are mesmerizing and can be as large as a city block. The “exhibit” changes daily. In fact, as the sun moves across the sky, the lighting can change the sculptures in a matter of minutes. (Photos by J. Mark Grosvenor – rights reserved)
