The future of Greenland’s ice hangs in the balance, and that could affect us all

by Cyril Christo | May 27, 2021 | May. 27, 2021

Cyril Christo and Marie Wilkinson

“ ‘The world is ill at ease, the sea does not freeze!’ said my friend Qisunguaq, pointing across the open water in front of Dalrymple Rock. ‘This year has not passed as it usually does; see, we shall soon be at the end of the visiting month [November] and we have still heard nothing from the villages south near Cape York. That has never happened before, and it must be your presence that is the reason of it. Do you not understand? Our earth is ashamed!’ ”

— Inuit elder to Knud Rasmussen, 1908

“You know us Greenlanders; none of us have much, some a little, some nothing. But we help each other along, and life is not so hard. With you things seem to be different. I am sorry for your poor! Their hearts must grow evil and bitter, as you say, when they see so much superfluity of which they never get a share. But to be a rich man in a land like that seems to me an even greater curse.”

— Inuit elder to Knud Rasmussen, 1908

“We believe that, if we paid no attention, to that over which we ourselves are not masters, huge avalanches of stones would come down and crush us, that enormous snowstorms would spring up to destroy us, and that the ocean would rise in huge waves whilst we were in our kayaks far out at sea.”

— Inuit elder to Knud Rasmussen, 1921

Greenland, the near-hallucinatory, hyperborean island of ice, seemed so far away in 2011, like a gigantic geologic oddity, floating at the top of the planet, basking in the lonely, isolated eccentricity of dark winter polar nights, where eaters of raw flesh, polar bears, looked down at the rest of the world from remarkable latitudes. Then, it felt like a fable or a fictive land. Today we know better. 2011 was the third or most extensive year for surface melt since records began in 1979. Over 30 percent of Greenland showed melt area. Its 234 glaciers are receding. The ice sheet is losing 1 million metric tons every minute. The ice loss and the changes experts thought would manifest in hundreds if not thousands of years have come in the blink of an eye in geologic time.

Greenland, the largest island on Earth, will in large part determine the future of Western civilization and the rest of the world. For centuries Greenland mystified European explorers, from Martin Frobisher in the late 16th century to half Greenlandic-born Knud Rasmussen, whose accounts of the Inuit at the top of the world are some of the most exhilarating and personal accounts of any explorer in history because he was not out to conquer the ice but to be conquered by the mystifying landscape, oral traditions, myths and genius of the Inuit people whom he honored and whose language he actually spoke.

It was back in 2006 that we first took our young son Lysander to visit the Inuit village Kinguan in Nunavut at the very top of the Canadian Shield, or Laurentian Plateau, with rocks that go back to Precambrian times, over 4 billion years ago. When we were there the population was maybe a dozen individuals. As of 2016 the population was zero. Bathurst Inlet is the traditional birthing grounds for the Barren Grounds caribou that have been the staple diet for the Inuit, the First Nations and even Métis Canadians. The first European to have visited the inlet was the British explorer John Franklin in 1821, a generation before his famed ill-fated expedition looking for the Northwest Passage. We were hosted by a former Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman, Glen Warner, and his wife, who hosted us with wonderful simple lodging in huts close to the Inuit community. A host who loved the wilderness but who simply did not believe in climate change. We witnessed our first peregrine falcon, the fastest bird on Earth, a few caribou, but no ice and no polar bears anywhere to be found. The next year, 2007, was to be very notable in being the first year the Northwest Passage became totally ice-free and a geologic turning point humanity will not soon forget.

Photo credit: Cyril Christo and Marie Wilkinson

The first time one sees the edge of Greenland, one feels one has arrived at another world. It was there in the summer of 2011, at the tremendous Jakobshavn Glacier, that we first got a glimpse of the melting taking place on an island four times the size of France. We were taken to see the glacier melt just outside of Ilulissat and where the largest discharge of ice on the island had taken place between 2000 and 2010. When Fridtjof Nansen, the Norwegian explorer and his party first crossed Greenland in August of 1888 they described their first encounter with tremendous ice crevasses, “Though at first they were narrow and harmless and easily covered in the stride” they soon saw that the ice “grew broader and opened a view to depths unfathomable.” Nansen tried something few explorers had imagined, and that no one had ever realized. He exclaimed “Death or the west coast of Greenland.” When he actually succeeded walking from the east coast to the west across the forbidding expanse of white, he called it a “little ski trip,” testimony to an unflagging courage and will that would never be matched again. Nor will it likely be possible again, for the interior is melting at an uncompromising speed. Konrad Steffen, a scientist who did forest, snow and landscape surveys and dedicated his life to sounding the alarm about rising sea levels and Greenland’s rapidly melting ice sheet, died just a few months ago, falling into a crevasse just 43 miles from Ilulissat. He had long ago predicted that the melting Greenland ice would force 300-500 million people away from the coasts in the largest migration in the history of humanity. Steffen gave his life to a part of the world that mystified him, but a region of the world whose changing surface has untold implications, “a change that we have not seen in thousands of years.” What took his life was a simple crevasse, but a crevasse, according to Ryan Neely III, unheard of until recently and which shows quite clearly the dramatic extent to which Greenland is ebbing.

When we were there in 2011, our guide Adam Lyberth showed us the vast extent of the Sermeq Kujalleq ice field outside Ilulissat, the most productive glacier in the Northern Hemisphere. It was giving “birth” to icebergs like some creature from a fantastic science fiction movie. We walked toward the ice field on a wooden boardwalk, peering in all directions at the stunning horizon of frozen white, which would have mesmerized the great 19th-century Romantic German painter Caspar David Friedrich. One of his most famous works was “The Sea of Ice” from 1824 dedicated to William Edward Parry’s 1819 expedition to the North Pole. Its secondary title, which highlights the immense power of hummocks and ice which crushed the expedition ship was “The Wreck of Hope.” The first version of the painting was originally shown in Dresden under the title “A Wrecked Ship off the Coast of Greenland in the Moonlight.” The coast of Greenland which calved the iceberg that sank the Titanic is a remarkably beautiful, and haunting coast. It was at this glacier that Adam showed us a creature that had just been discovered and new to science, a half-spider, half-snail creature that used to reside under the glacier and that was now visible to human eyes for the first time. When we saw the aquamarine waters melting torrentially down the ice face of the Sermeq Kujalleq, like a river deluged with torrents of aquamarine tears, it was a vision of a small continent dissolving and weeping uncontrollably, like an island never to be the same again.

Photo credit: Cyril Christo and Marie Wilkinson

Few the past 400 years Arctic explorers have been heading northward through the Davis Strait off the coast of West Greenland, looking for the fabled passage to the East Indies. Up until recently ships were blocked by the ice pack meters thick, so crushing in its power that the British Empire at times seemed to have been brought to its knees. The last time we were on the west coast in 2012 brought record-breaking ice melt as few in the 19th century could have imagined. Hinrich Johannes Rink, a Danish glaciologist, was one of the first to collect stories from the native people in the 1850s, an explorer who delved into the dynamics of glacier flow. He saw the ice as a vital geologic force, and an eminent foundation in the Inuit mind. He wrote, “Greenlanders entertain a sort of superstitious awe regarding the icy interior of their country.” Even Nansen called Greenland, “an unknown interior in all probability,” that “contained no wealth or material treasures.” How he would be surprised at the nations today clamoring to extract the mineral wealth of the world’s largest island. The 18th-century missionary Hans Egede esteemed that Greenland was of “no use to mankind.” We now know that the melting interior of the island will unveil rare-earth elements from gems to zinc and iron that will invite a mercantile invasion from the outside world, especially China, which is fast running out of resources. What was once considered the end of the world is fast becoming a key focal point for international trade and commerce, not all of it to Greenlanders’ benefit.

Where there used to be a vast zone of seeming emptiness, an immense sanctuary of frozen silence is now being transformed by the sound of calving icebergs and streams of melting ice flowing from a once imperturbable ice sheet 5,000 feet thick. The din of drilling machines ready to usurp the riches of the world’s largest island is taking place in the form of a giant tear which Greenland resembles. Greenland, Siberia, Alaska and Canada hold twice the carbon currently swirling in the world’s atmosphere. 3.8 trillion metric tons of ice has melted since 1992, half a generation before we went up north for the first time.

A century ago, Peter Freuchen, friend of Rasmussen, was told by an Inuit elder, “I collect shadows and darkness so that the world will get light again, and I keep it all locked up here in these boxes.” It was in this strangely numinous and increasingly rare world that our Inuit guide Adam told us about the time that he was driving near the Sermeq Kujalleq glacier a busload of terminally ill cancer patients whose last wish was to witness the immense canopy of the ice cap and hopefully see a caribou or perhaps a musk ox. Adam told the visitors that to see a musk ox so near town was very rare and that they should not get their hopes up. Toward the end of their trip, a peregrine falcon swooped in front of the bus, a caribou ran alongside them and then, as if an exclamation mark to verify the magic of the far north, a musk ox passed in front of their vehicle, in plain sight of everyone. Adam was dumbfounded. People so close to possible death met their deepest wishes in one of the harshest places on Earth. Something of the aspirations and mindfulness that have been harbored in people’s hearts, something of the song that has moved people to speak to the wind, was realized on that singular short trip, for some people living their last days on Earth.

That Greenland’s great ice sheet may be beyond the point of salvation is conclusive. Some, like John C. Moore and Rupert Gladstone of the Arctic Centre at the University of Lapland, have proposed a massive geo-engineering project, a sea wall that would essentially prevent the warm ocean currents from melting the glaciers around Ilulissat. Then maybe, as Moore says, “If you can turn the melting off, the ice shelf can re-ground.” It is a tall order and enormously expensive, but one humanity is now forced to consider. The lessons upon us are immense and we do not have the discipline, or complexity of spirit to deal with the geologic upheavals its native people have embodied in their stories and myths for centuries. We are upstarts in the game of civilization and may be in the process of failing ourselves and the planet, but perhaps we can be penitent in the knowledge that now we need to mitigate the weight of our presence on this Earth. The next several decades will dictate how we adapt or accept the torrent of tears in the form of icebergs falling from the cryospheric Godzilla Greenland has become to civilization. The Beaufort Gyre current in the North Atlantic could actually lead to a cooling of Europe in the decades to come. The surge of cold fresh water from Greenland mixing with salt water in the Atlantic causing a shift in the cyclonic activity of the water could have serious implications for the weather of the North Atlantic for decades to come.

Photo credit: Cyril Christo and Marie Wilkinson

Freuchen told of a practice from a century ago. When one had not seen the sun for several months, one was to remove one’s hood and mittens and face the glowing sun. Once during a long sled ride in the far northwest of Greenland, Freuchen heard an Inuit elder, Ulugatok, tell a scientist never to laugh at this story. The elder continued, “We think that if we do this we shall not die, at least until the sun returns next year. Even if it does no good, we enjoy life so much that we do anything to keep it.” For the European mind, for the scientist, this was superstition and he wanted no part of the ceremony. He refused to take part in the ritual. He later died of hunger and madness on the opposite shore of Greenland, there on the northeast coast. Are there lessons to be learnt from what seem like antiquated thoughts and myths? Are there ways to reclaim the consciousness of a people who have depended on and honored the ice for millennia? The humility world civilization will be forced to absorb is enormous. The lessons of Greenland, once so distant from the countries in the lower latitudes, are being unleashed. Those countries who hope to plunder it for its riches would do well to heed the warnings of the elder who told Rasmussen over a century ago. “You know us Greenlanders; none of us have much, some a little, some nothing. But we help each other along, and life is not so hard. With you things seem to be different. I am sorry for your poor! Their hearts must grow evil and bitter, as you say, when they see so much superfluity of which they never get a share. But to be a rich man in a land like that seems to me an even greater curse.”

We may have discovered water on the moon, and looking for some figment of life on Mars. Some scientists and NASA engineers may be keen to exploit our satellite for bases in the near future. But what happens on Greenland’s ice sheet has far greater implications for humanity. Half the drainage of the world’s greatest island happens on the edges and the rest on the interior. The edges are starting to resemble a lunar landscape. Greenland was a Cold War base for much of the 20th century and its tactical importance between Russia and the U.S. will continue, but it is for its ability to flood the world’s major cities, alongside its great cousin, Antarctica, that it will be most remembered. In 2017, ice had retreated by 1,000 feet from its edges and lost about 100 feet in elevation.

Now we know that a major part of Greenland’s ice sheet is on the brink of a tipping point. If it were to completely melt, the lost ice would raise sea levels by seven meters. It would also halt the Gulf Stream, which would affect the Amazon and tropical monsoons. As Andrew Shepherd at the University of Leeds admits, ”the diagnosis is shockingly clear: our climate is sick and needs urgent care.” Arctic explorers from only a few decades ago would be aghast to know what humanity had done to one of the most remarkable islands on Earth. Greenland has entered a new unstable state. The melting of the ice sheet has and will irreversibly affect world civilization as we have known it for all time.

Photo credit: Cyril Christo and Marie Wilkinson

“I found there the great adventure of the ice, deep and pure as infinity, the silent, starry night, the depths of Nature herself, the fulness of the mystery of life, the eternal round of the universe and its eternal death.”

— Fridtjof Nansen (1861-1930)

“Heaven is a great country with many holes in. These holes we call the stars. Many people live there, and whenever they upset anything, it falls down through the stars in the form of rain or snow.”

— Inuit elder to Knud Rasmussen, 1908

“The Arctic is the world’s cooling system. If we lose the Arctic, we lose the world.”

— Stefan Lindström, Finnish official

Learn more about Cyril Christo and Marie Wilkinson’s work at their website.