John’s Blog/Newsletter: SEA LEVEL RISE NOW

Surprising Ways That Climate Change Affects Greenland – #2 of 3 Part Blog Series

Last week I looked at the strategic location issues of Greenland and why China and the United States are taking great interest in the sparsely populated, gigantic island. This week, my focus is on how the rapidly changing planet is affecting Greenland. In part 3 of the series, next week, I will look at how Greenland is affecting the rest of the world.

The effects of climate change on Greenland are a mixed bag, some positive, some negative:

• More Land – As the giant ice sheet covering 80% of Greenland melts and recedes inland, Greenland gets a big increase in useable land area. That’s truly good for farming, to expand villages, and even for roads to connect the historically isolated coastal communities.
• Rising Sea Level Not a Concern – As the ice on Greenland melts, it is starting to cause sea levels to rise all over the globe, threatening thousands of coastal communities. Paradoxically, Greenland is the one nation that is not worried about sea level rise (SLR) for three different reasons, one obvious, and two very subtle:
  • First, looking at the typical steep rocky coastline in the image above of the popular village of Ilulissat (“E-Loo-Lee-Sat”) it can be seen that even a considerable increase in sea level will not be devastating the way it will be in low-lying coastal locations, like South Florida, Vietnam, Bangladesh, the Bahamas, the Maldives, etc.
  • Second, as the billions of tons of ice turns into meltwater and icebergs, the enormous lessening of that weight of the ice, allows the land to rise, known as uplift. As long as the rate of land rising is faster than global sea level rising, sea level will appear to fall in Greenland, as happens now in places like Alaska. Eventually as the rate of global SLR increases, it will overtake the land uplift, causing local sea level to rise there too; I suspect that will occur some time mid-century.
  • Third, (for the science geeks) as the huge mass of ice on Greenland melts and gets redistributed all over the world, it has a subtle effect on the distribution of the Earth’s center of gravity, moving it away from Greenland. Presently the huge ice mass on Greenland has an effect to “pull” on the oceans, the same way that the moon pulls on them, causing high tide. So as the ice leaves Greenland, it has less gravitational effect on the oceans, lowering sea level around the island. As a result, places like the east coast of the United States is estimated to have as much as 25% more sea level increase than the global average. This effect will happen over centuries, proportional to the melting of the Greenland ice sheet. (BTW, this same gravitational effect eventually will happen as the even larger ice sheet on Antarctica melts, with the effect to raise ocean levels in the northern hemisphere.)
• Warmer Weather – a mixed blessing. Given the fact that their climate for the last few thousand years has generally been extremely cold, the rapid warming of the Arctic is at times welcome. Yet the effect to thin the ice has negative impact on many cultural ways, such as the use of dogsleds. When the ice is too soft, too thin, or melted entirely, the sleds will not slide and it is not safe for the dogs. Increasingly in the rapidly warming Arctic, the dog sled season is becoming greatly shortened and unpredictable.
  • Thinning Sea Ice has impact on wildlife from seals to polar bears also affecting the traditional hunting and culture.
  • Reindeer herders in the north are finding it difficult to continue their traditional patterns due to the drastic increase in temperature and lack of predictability in the seasonal patterns of breeding, migration, and food supply.
  • On a positive note, there are large increases in plants, wildflowers, gardening and farming due to longer growing season, receding ice cover, and good irrigation from the melting ice.
• Winter Rain in Greenland is almost unknown, yet that was my report a few months ago here in a blog post. Largely this is associated with the melting of the Arctic Ocean, causing much more moisture to be in the air compared to when the northern sea was solid, as it has been for the last few million years. Rain on top of ice sheets and glaciers has a highly destructive effect, both to melt the ice rapidly and then to shatter the ice, once it gets down into cracks and expands as it freezes. This further weakens the ice sheets and glaciers.
• Impact on Valuable Fisheries – One of the hardest effects to predict is what happens to Greenland’s valuable fisheries due to changing temperature, salinity, food supply and nutrients. Largely that depends on the currents coming up from the Atlantic, but also on the salinity change due to the enormous amounts of fresh meltwater coming off the island. The effects on the fisheries in the years ahead are largely uncertain. Fisheries could be improved or decimated. That one is somewhat of a roll of the dice and could change from year to year as ocean currents shift.
• Great for Tourism – One of the clearest effects of the warming climate and melting glaciers is to increase tourism to Greenland. People from all over the world want to photograph and experience the retreating glaciers and the spawning of truly gigantic icebergs. Though still rather small, tourism is booming. Having been there many times with expeditions at different seasons, I would have to say that tourism growth is a real positive for the local economy and welcomed by the locals. There is also a big increase in scientific visitors, doing all manner of studies about the melting glaciers.

The effects the warming on the Greenland natives, the Inuit, the people of the Arctic, is huge, even life-altering. The poignancy cannot be missed. Their way of life for thousands of years has been changed in the last decade as a result of global warming and climate change. They had almost zero effect to trigger global warming, but are feeling some of the earliest and greatest impacts compared to any place on the planet. Next week in part three of this series, I will update and comment on the effects of Greenland’s melting ice sheet on the rest of the world.

For anyone wanting to join an exclusive fact-finding expedition to Greenland, spaces are still available on our trip to Iceland and Greenland, September 8-15, 2019 Full information and a short video are available at: www.greenland2019.johnenglander.net

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