Greenland glaciers melt as never before, especially in Helheim

This is where the refrigerator door of the Earth is left open, where the glaciers are dwindling and the sea begins to rise.

David Holland, specialist in air and ocean science at New York University, who follows Greenland from above and below, calls it " the end of the planet. It refers to geography and does not make an apocalyptic prediction. Yet, in many ways, this place within the Arctic Circle is the writing of the warmer, wetter future of the planet.

It's so hot here that one day in August, coats are left on the ground and that Holland and his colleagues are working on melting ice without gloves. In one of the closest cities, Kulusuk, the morning temperature reached 52 degrees Fahrenheit – warm enough for long sleeves.

Ice Holland is on for thousands of years. Scientists say the water will disappear within a year or two, adding more water to seas around the world.

Summer this year hits Greenland hard with record heat and extreme melt. According to experts, about 440 billion tonnes of ice – perhaps more – will have melted or calved off the Greenland Ice Cap. That's enough to submerge the entire state of Pennsylvania underwater, about a foot deep.

Only from July 31 to August 3, more than 58 billion tons have melted from the surface. The average for this time of year is less than 18 billion tonnes. And that does not even count the huge calving or the hot water that gnaws at the glaciers below.

One of the places hardest hit by this hot summer in Greenland is south-east of the frozen giant island. Helheim, one of the fastest retreating glaciers in Greenland, has shrunk about 10 km since the arrival of scientists in 2005.

Several scientists, such as oceanographer Josh Willis of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said that what was happening was a result of both man-made climate change and natural but strange weather conditions.

The glaciers here are shrinking in the summer and growing in the winter, but nothing like this year.

Summit Station, a nearly 3-km-high research camp located to the north, warmed above zero a second time this year for a record time of 16.5 hours. Before this year, this station was above zero for only 6.5 hours in 2012, once in 1889 and in the Middle Ages.

"If you look at climate model projections, we can expect to see larger areas of the ice layer melting for longer periods of the year and greater mass loss to the lake. 39; future, "said Tom Mote, scientist in ice sciences from the University of Georgia. "There is every reason to believe that years that look like this will become more commonplace."

A NASA satellite revealed that the Greenland ice cap had lost about 255 billion tonnes of ice a year between 2003 and 2016, with the loss rate generally deteriorating during this period. Almost all of the 28 Greenland glaciers identified by Danish climatologist Ruth Mottram have declined, including those from Helheim.

In Helheim, ice, snow and water seem to go on forever, encircled by bare mountains that show no sign of ice but overlap in winter. The only thing that gives visitors a sense of scale is the helicopter carrying Holland and his team. He is dwarf in the landscape, an almost imperceptible red dot against the ice cliffs where Helheim stops and his remains begin.

These ice cliffs have a height of 225 to 328 feet. Right next to them, the remains of Helheim – sea ice, snow and icebergs – form an almost white expanse, with a mixture of shapes and textures. The water often accumulates in the middle of this brilliant white of almost fluorescent blue that looks like Kool-Aid.

While pilot Martin Norregaard tries to land his helicopter on the broken part of what used to be a glacier – a mixture called "mud" – he looks for ice stained with earth, a sign that it is firm enough for the helicopter. White ice could hide a deep crevice leading to a cold, deadly dive.

Holland and his team set up to install a radar and a GPS to follow the movement of the ice and to help understand why salt water, hot and once tropical, attacking the "belly" of the glacier was boiling at the area.

"It takes a long time to grow a layer of ice, thousands and thousands of years, but they can be broken or destroyed pretty quickly," Holland said.

Holland, like Willis, suspects that warm, salty water coming in part from the Gulf Stream plays a larger role than previously thought in the melting ice of Greenland.

If this is the case, this is probably bad news for the planet, because it means faster melting and rising sea levels. In 2100, Greenland alone could cause a rise in sea level. sea ​​of ​​three or four feet, said Willis.

It is therefore crucial to know what role air plays above and the water below.

"What we want for this is a forecast of the pack ice," Holland said.

In this distant landscape, the sound travels easily for miles. Every minute, there is a slight rumble that sounds like thunder. But that's not it. It's the ice that crackles.

In the small town of Kulusuk, about 40 minutes away by helicopter, Mugu Utuaq says the winter, which lasted up to 10 months when he was small, can now be as short as five months. That counts for him because as a fourth-largest dog sled in Greenland, he has 23 dogs and must race there.

They can not run in the summer, but they must always eat. So Utuaq and his friends will hunt the whale with rifles in small boats. If they succeed, dogs can eat whale.

"People get rid of their dogs because there is no season," said Yewlin, who wears only one name. He ran a team of sled dogs for tourists at a hotel in the nearby town of Tasiilaq, but they can not do it anymore.

The melting of glaciers, the decrease of ice and the warm weather are very different from his childhood, said the mayor of Kulusuk, Justus Paulsen, 58 years old.

"We like that because we like to have a summer," said Paulsen.

Holland looks from his base camp to the Helheim Glacier and sees the situation as a whole. And that's not good, he said. Not for here. Not for the Earth as a whole.

"It's nice to have a planet surrounded by glaciers," Holland said.

Borenstein writes for the Associated Press.