In Greenland, the collapse of a glacier shows its impact on the climate

TASILLAQ, Greenland (Reuters) – Perched on a cliff above the Helheim Glacier in Greenland, I tried calling my wife in New York on a satellite phone. Before I could leave a message, an explosion broke the arctic silence.

More explosions followed.

I crossed a muddy tundra up to a video camera on a tripod overlooking the glacier and ripped off the trash bag that I had used to protect it. I hit the record as fast as possible.

The slamming sounds turned into a low rumble. Over the next half-hour, the ice broke up and a four-mile-wide piece swung into the sea during a process called calving – rarely seen on this scale.

(For a photo report on the Greenland glaciers, see: reut.rs/2MKbUKT, for the rest of the Greenland project series on climate change, see 🙂

As a Reuters photographer, I captured volcanoes erupting, after hurricanes and tornadoes, and the war, but I never felt so small. This is a moving end to a multi-month project on climate change in Greenland.

The idea was to follow scientists doing climate research. They had the computational power to understand global warming for only a few decades, and the numbers are sobering. But where do the data come from?

To find out, we turned to a team of scientists leaving Iceland and affiliated with a project of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) entitled Oceans Melting Greenland. They aim to understand how the warming of the oceans melts the ice of the island from below.

We also spent time with the New York University's David Holland oceanographer, who was involved in a separate research project and also attended the calving of the Helheim Glacier.

I realized the magnitude of this work aboard a NASA research aircraft with senior researcher Joshua Willis and other scientists, at 12,000 feet above sea level. , in the seemingly infinite white horizon of the Greenlandic ice cap.

The plane sank and buckled over the steep cliffs and rock faces of East Greenland that are slowly crushed to dust by huge glaciers.

I joined the NASA team for a week in March in Keflavik, Iceland. Every day we took off ice tracks and flew over the coast of Greenland. Scientists Tim Miller, Ron Muellerschoen and David Austerberry collected on their computers a stream of seemingly endless numbers, symbols and letters from radar data on glacial formations.

Holland, in New York, is studying Helheim and another glacier called Jakobshavn for more than a decade.

In June, I went to see the Helheim Glacier, near the coastal village of Tasiilaq, which has about 2,000 inhabitants. It has been remarkably successful in becoming a tourist destination, a feat with only two hotels, which sometimes serve as whale meat.

Transportation here is limited to the boat or helicopter in the summer and dog sledding in the winter. In summer, the sun goes down only a few hours a day.

Holland collected data on seismic activity, temperature and wind, as well as accelerated images.

For journalists and scientists, climate change is hard to document. It occurs most often imperceptibly – a temperature increase of one-tenth of a degree, a few inches of rain less, an ice cap that melts slowly.

That's why it was so overwhelming to see billions of tons of ice collapse at all once. Suddenly, he did not feel like a small problem or a distant problem.