A new island in East Greenland is a clear sign of how the place is changing. It was dubbed Warming Island by American explorer Dennis Schmitt when he discovered in 2005 that it had emerged from under the retreating ice. If the ice cap melted entirely, oceans would rise by 7 metres (23 feet), flooding New York and London, and drowning island nations like the Maldives...
Greenland, the world's largest island, is mostly covered by an ice cap of about 2.6 million cubic km (624,000 cubic miles) that accounts for a 10th of all the fresh water in the world. Over the last 30 years, its melt zone has expanded by 30 percent, and now the cap loses 100 to 150 cubic km of ice every year -- more than all the ice in the Alps...
In the past 15 years, winter temperatures have risen about 5 degrees Celsius (9 Fahrenheit) on the cap, while spring and autumn temperatures increased about 3 degrees Celsius (5 Fahrenheit). Summer temperatures are unchanged...
The more the surface melts, the faster the ice sheet moves towards the ocean. The glacier Swiss Camp rests on has doubled its speed to about 15 km (9 miles) a year in the last 12 years, just as its tongue retreated 10 km into the fjord...
If you're a fisherman in Greenland, however, global warming is doing wonders for your business. Warmer waters entice seawolf and cod to swim farther north in the Atlantic into Greenlandic nets. In this Disko Bay town, the world's iceberg capital, the harbour is now open year-round because winter is no longer cold enough to freeze it solid. Warmer weather also boosts tourism, a source of big development hopes for the 56,000 mostly Inuit inhabitants of Greenland, which is a self-governing territory of Denmark. Hoping to lure American visitors, Air Greenland launched a direct flight from Baltimore last month, and there is even talk of "global warming tourism" to see Warming Island. One commentator, noting the carbon dioxide emissions such travel would create, has called that "eco-suicide tourism".
