INSTANT ISLANDS
In terms of change in nature, re-designing the topography in the blink of an eye.
Rising temperatures are not simply melting ice; they are changing the very geography of coastlines. Nunataks - “lonely mountains” in Inuit - that were encased in the margins of Greenland’s ice sheet are being freed of their age-old bonds, exposing a new chain of islands.
“We are already in a new era of geography,” said the Arctic explorer Will Steger. “This phenomenon - of an island all of a sudden appearing out of nowhere and the ice melting around it - is a real common phenomenon now.”
With 27,555 miles of coastline and thousands of fjords, inlets, bays and straits, Greenland has always been hard to map. Now the new maps are becoming obsolete almost as soon as they are created.
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Carl Egede Boggild, a professor of snow-and-ice physics at the University Centre of Svalbard, said Greenland could be losing more than 80 cubic miles of ice per year. “That corresponds to three times the volume of all the glaciers in the Alps,” Boggild said.
He discovered an island himself a year ago while flying over northwestern Greenland. “Suddenly I saw an island with glacial ice on it,” he said. “I looked at the map and it should have been a nunatak, but the present ice margin was about 10 kilometres away. So I can say that within the last five years the ice margin had retreated at least 10 kilometres.”
The abrupt acceleration of melting in Greenland has taken climate scientists by surprise. The melting of tidewater glaciers, which discharge ice into the oceans as they break up in the process called calving, has doubled and tripled in speed all over Greenland. Ice shelves are breaking up.
“The general thinking until very recently was that ice sheets don’t react very quickly to climate,” said Martin Truffer, a glaciologist at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. “But that thinking is changing right now, because we’re seeing things that people have thought are impossible.” Article
