You might think the prospect of the polar ice cap melting would be spreading alarm in Greenland, but Mark Stratton discovers the truth is rather different
Climate change is not such a problem for us,’ says Marius Olsen, deputy mayor of Sisimiut, in southwestern Greenland. Standing beside two giant narwhal whale tusks that are mounted on the council chamber’s wall, he adds with a smile: ‘It means our island grows larger while others in the world get smaller.’
This may sound like bravado in the face of incontrovertible evidence that Greenland’s ice cap is melting. Only this summer Dr Tim Lenton of the University of East Anglia in the UK voiced his opinion that Greenland’s polar cap could melt away in 300 years, triggering a global sea level rise of seven metres.
For high-profile politicians, from US senator John McCain to German chancellor Angela Merkel, it has become de rigueur to follow each other’s carbon slipstreams to Greenland to deliver apocalyptic pronouncements on global warming. As I arrived at Kangerlussuaq airport, gateway to western Greenland, French environment minister Jean-Louis Borloo and his media entourage were just touching down in a private government jet.
Yet for Greenland’s 57,000 population times have never been so good. Despite a melting ice cap, the world’s largest island’s economy is booming.
Retreating ice is exposing ancient bedrock enriched with precious minerals including diamonds, olivine and zinc. Gold is already being mined, while its liquid equivalent, oil, is being prospected off the west coast. Tourism is flourishing, hydroelectric power driven by glacial meltwater may soon see the country exporting abundant renewable energy, and precious stocks of cod have returned to Greenland’s warmer waters this summer for the first time in two decades. Such new found riches have even led to talk of future independence from Denmark – which annually bankrolls the island to the tune of 3.5 billion kroner ($688m).
A 30-minute, wave-skimming flight westwards from Kangerlussuaq lies the coastal port of Sisimiut. Some 50km inside the Arctic Circle, it is home to 5,000 hardy souls who inhabit blue-, plum-, and yellow-painted houses, scattered in the lee of Mount Kællingehætte. By day Sisimiut’s serenity is disturbed by the sounds of construction. By night, when the velvety sky is inflamed by the incandescent green of the aurora borealis, resting sled dogs howl for attention. For local tour guide Mikkel Neilsen it has been a record summer. He feels the publicity Greenland has received from the climate change debate has sparked an increase in the number of tourists; many aboard cruise ships such as the new Norwegian MS Fram.
Sisimiut does not possess the spectacular icescapes found northwards along the coast so relies on cultural attractions instead. Neilsen takes me on a hike to Teleøen, an island where archaeological excavations are revealing the lives of the first Saqqaq settlers who arrived in Greenland 4,500 years ago. We see centuries-old Inuit graves positioned overlooking their favourite hunting grounds, and peat foundations that mark where their longhouses once stood. From the 10th century onwards Europeans arrived in Greenland, but it is widely believed these Nordic people abandoned the island around 1415 – forced out by global cooling.
At night, when the velvety sky is inflamed
by the incandescent colours of the aurora
borealis, resting sled dogs howl for attention.
Back in town, house construction can scarcely keep pace with demand – new homes fetch around $300,000 for 100m sq. They contrast with the ageing, still-inhabited tenement blocks that remain a legacy of an inglorious period of Danish rule known as G-60 – a 1950s and 1960s collectivisation programme aimed at forcing outlaying and traditional-living Inuit communities to settle in towns for ease of administration. It led to many social problems, such as family breakdown and alcoholism. hose days are long past, explains Jørn Hansen of Sisimiut’s Chamber of Commerce. ‘Sisimiut is booming,’ he says.
‘There is diamond mining 150km south of here, the cruise ships are arriving in greater numbers, and demand for construction is so great we have a labour shortage.’ Unemployment has fallen to just 2% over the course of the past decade, adds Hansen, and alongside the fisheries – which provide nearly half Sisimiut’s employment – the relocation of national companies such as merchandisers Pisiffik, combined with the town’s reputation as an educational centre of excellence, has brought prosperity and an increasingly skilled workforce.
Aluminium-processing giant Alcoa also wants to build what would be the world’s second-largest smelter in Greenland. It has been attracted by the potential of abundant, low-cost hydroelectric energy produced by using meltwater – Sisimiut will become self-sufficient in clean energy by 2009 – ironically the ice cap’s demise is adding to Greenland’s appeal.
Outside the Chamber of Commerce, I am reminded of the old days as hunters arrive in town to unload a trailer of freshly shot reindeer meat. But this is rapidly becoming little more than an indicator of a social pastime – fewer than 500 Greenlanders live a subsistence lifestyle. The ice has retreated so far north of Sisimiut that hunting by dog sled is no longer possible. ‘Hunters in the north and east face severe changes as their traditional way of hunting becomes harder as sea ice vanishes,’ says Susan Frydendahl, information officer with the Home Rule Government. or the meantime, fishing remains the biggest employer in town. The Royal Greenland prawn factory is the largest processing plant for cold-water prawns in the world. There is, however, uncertainty as to what changing sea temperatures may mean for the industry. Prawns have started to disappear from the coast around southern Greenland. There is uncertainty about whether warmer sea temperatures or the sudden reappearance of cod were leading to prawns’ decline, but it is thought they are migrating north in search of colder waters.
‘We welcome these warmer temperatures,’ insists deputy mayor Olsen, himself a fisherman. ‘We’ve seen cod come back and herring last spring, and we’ve lost the winter ice that used to stop the boats going out.’ He remains sceptical about global warming, however, showing me material downloaded from the internet suggesting Sisimiut’s temperature changes are cyclical. The research claims there was a ‘heat wave’ around the town in the 1930s and 1940s, adding that the mean temperature in 1947 reached -1.7°C, compared to -7.3°C in 1992. ‘We Greenlanders have historically adapted to change around us and we’re not going to sit still and wait for the threat of climate change to affect us,’ he adds.
The flight to Ilulissat, Greenland’s most popular tourist spectacle, is quite magnificent. A coastline indented with fjords and fissured glacial deposits is backed by the ghostly white glare of the polar cap stretching across the horizon as far as the eye can see. Here, the white expanse makes the first Norse settler Erik the Red’s decision to call the island ‘green land’ in 984AD seem nonsensical. Yet with the ice cap, where some of the snow is 250,000 years old and 3km thick, reportedly thinning at one metre a year this may prove to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Soon the icebergs begin to appear. From the cockpit I steal glimpses of them – some the size of a department store – choking Disko Bay. But the Air Greenland pilot tells me the ice cap has retreated 100km north of Aasiaat, the town that sits on Disko Bay, in 20 years. He says that only a decade ago it was possible to travel by dogsled across the bay. Now it remains open water for most of the year. It is only when you travel northwards that you realise the extent to which the ice cap is in retreat.
Ilulissat, which means ‘icebergs’ in Greenlandic, was established in 1741 and lies at the mouth of a spectacular 40km-long icefjord. Similar in size to Sisimiut, the town is built around a pretty harbour where colourful fishing trawlers bob alongside breakaway chunks of glacier ice. The fishermen return with boats bursting with halibut. In the meat market you can buy mattaq – whale rind from a humpback whale. ‘I prefer a little beluga whale on dark bread,’ says my guide, Malik.
My hotel that evening offers up a buffet of smoked polar bear, muskox roast and whale in red wine. More appealing are the views from my window of leviathan icebergs stranded in Disko Bay. They have calved from Ilulissat’s main attraction: the huge Unesco World Heritage-listed icefjord glacier known as Sermeq Kujalleq.
The glacier drains 7% of the Greenlandic ice sheet and yields icebergs 70 to 80m high. But scientists say it has retreated 40km since 1850 and, worryingly, 15km since 1998. The glacier’s surface is thinning 10m every year and the velocity of ice pouring from it has doubled in the past decade as increasing meltwater lubricates its flow.
Wilhelm Gemander, a Dane who has lived in Ilulissat for 22 years and takes tourists to the glacier by boat, tells me that over the years he has noticed these greater amounts of ice coming from the glacier around early spring and summer.
‘It’s definitely warmer now,’ he says. ‘Not so long ago I remember -25°C temperatures around Christmas, now it is closer to -15°C.’ We ease past the serene icebergs, sculpted into many shapes and sizes and tinged blue because they are so oxygen-rich, some drifting like giant slices of frosted gâteau. Occasional gunshot crashes signify collapses as the icebergs calve into smaller pieces. e travel around a rocky cape to Rodebay, an isolated hamlet of 50 inhabitants that relies on fishing and hunting for a living, and has done so ever since it was founded by 18th-century Dutch whalers. It is eerily deserted bar hundreds of sled dogs tied up for the summer amid racks of wind-drying fish. A winch on the shoreline still reels in the occasional whale; part of Greenland’s quota of 160 per year. A piece of jawbone cartilage is all that remains of a recent fin whale catch.
Gemander fishes out crystalline chunks of ice with a net, explaining they could be tens of thousands of years old. But someday, he admits, it may all have melted away. ‘Sure, we’re seeing positives,’ he says. ‘We can receive supply ships most of the year round and we can grow potatoes. But there
are bound to be losers if all our inland ice melts.’
Local customs
Despite rapid change, some traditions are still alive and well. For example, Kaffemik ceremonies, where a family opens its home to the neigh-bours to serve coffee and cake on a special occasion, are still common.
Ancient curse
The use of tupilaks to harm enemies is now much less common. Carved from reindeer bone or walrus tusk, these small figurines with their grotesque, ghost-like faces were still being used by Inuit in the early 20th century. Made to represent the victim, they were then blessed by evil spells and typically cast into the sea.
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