In photo: The collapse of a glacier shows the impact of climate change on Greenland

POn a cliff above Helheim Glacier in Greenland, I try to call my wife in New York with a satellite phone. Before I can leave a message, an explosion breaks the silence of the Arctic.

More explosions follow.

I cross a muddy tundra in front of a video camera installed on a tripod overlooking the glacier and rips the trash bag I used to protect it. I hit the record as fast as I can focus.

The bright sounds turn into a low rumble. Over the next half-hour, the ice breaks up and a four-mile-wide block collapses into the sea according to a process called calving – a phenomenon rarely observed on this scale.

As a Reuters photographer, I captured the erupting volcanoes, the aftermath of hurricanes and tornadoes and the war, but I never felt so small. It was a poignant end to a multi-month project on climate change in Greenland.

The idea was to follow scientists conducting climate research. They have the computer 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 from Iceland, affiliated with a NASA project called 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 New York University oceanographer David Holland, who was involved in a separate research project and also attended the calving of the Helheim Glacier.

I am aware of the magnitude of this work aboard a NASA search aircraft with senior scientist Joshua Willis and other scientists, at 12,192 meters, to observe the weather. seemingly infinite white horizon of the Greenland icecap.

The banks and loops of the plane stand above the steep cliffs and rock faces of East Greenland that are slowly crumbling under the action of the river. Immense glaciers.

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

NYU Holland has been studying Helheim and another glacier called Jakobshavn for over ten years.

Last June, he visited the Helheim Glacier, near the seaside village of Tasiilaq, which has about 2,000 inhabitants. Remarkably, he has managed to become a tourist destination, a success with only two hotels, which sometimes serve whale meat.

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

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

Both journalists and scientists, climate change is difficult to document. This occurs most often imperceptibly – an increase in temperature of one-tenth of a degree, a few inches of rain less, a layer of ice slowly melting.

That's why it was so overwhelming to see billions of tons of ice collapse once. Suddenly, that did not seem to be a minor or distant problem.

Reuters