NEWS

GREENLAND: Goodbye glaciers, hello broccoli

05/19/2008

Lisa Friedman, ClimateWire reporter

Climate experts don’t talk about it much, but global warming will create economic winners as well as losers.

Greenland, where glaciers are retreating and ice sheets melting at a rapid pace, is expected to see both.

Seal hunting, the backbone of Inuit culture and heavily dependent on abundant drift ice, is disappearing. In its place: broccoli, growing where it never could before. Cold-water shrimp, which accounts for about 70 percent of Greenland’s exports, also is vanishing. But cod, not seen in Greenland since the 1960s, is making a comeback. Then there’s the gold. Melting ice caps have revealed a wealth of once-hidden riches—including, possibly, oil.

"This can be a boon financially," Alequa Hammond, Greenland’s minister for finance and foreign affairs, acknowledged in Washington recently.

But whether the changes coming to the land first colonized by Eric the Red are good, bad or just different, Hammond said all will be a hurdle for the nation of about 56,000 people. An entire generation has never fished cod, for example, and the resurgence means overhauling the industry’s fleet and machinery. New mining opportunities could bring wealth, but also stark environmental concerns.

Taken altogether, Hammond said, "It’s the biggest challenge we’ve ever had."

According to satellite studies, Greenland’s ice cap, which helps keep the rest of the world cool, is melting at an even faster rate than scientists once predicted.

Walleed Abdalati, head of the Cryospheric Sciences Branch at NASA’S Goddard Space Flight Center, said Greenland’s perennial ice—the thick, hardy kind that survives the summer—is getting smaller. He told Arctic experts at the Embassy of Denmark, that scientists were stunned to find in 2007 that the sea ice had diminished 23 percent in a span of just two years. Once that summer ice is gone, it takes years to replace—leaving in its stead thinner ice that’s even more vulnerable to melting.

By the end of the century, Abdalati said, it is possible the Arctic summer could be ice-free.

‘What happens in Greenland doesn’t stay in Greenland’

"These areas are changing, and they’re changing a lot, and it matters," he said, noting that scientists estimate a 1 meter sea level rise will mean some 150 million people worldwide will be displaced from their homes. If Greenland’s ice cap goes completely—which most scientists think is improbable—that could raise sea levels 23 feet.

Melting ice in Greenland will create a wide variety of winners and losers, both there and elsewhere. Photo by Jens Buurgaard Nielsen.

As goes the sea ice, so goes the polar bear, noted Tom Armstrong, senior adviser for the U.S. Geological Survey’s global climate change program. Now officially a threatened species, two-thirds of the the world’s 20,000 to 25,000 polar bears now in the Arctic will disappear, scientists say.

"What happens in Greenland doesn’t stay in Greenland," Armstrong said. "The bottom line is that sea ice is going away, and with it viable polar bear habitat."

But there are people to think about as well. Kenneth Høegh, Greenland’s chief agricultural adviser, noted that while warming will increase plant production in southern Greenland, allowing new crops and biannual harvests, Inuit seal hunters will likely have to turn to other livelihoods like tourism.

"We’ll have a hard time keeping the old cultures alive," he said. Noting that about 410,000 square kilometers (approximately 518,000 square miles) of Greenland is ice-free and that area is growing every year, Høegh joked, "We’re getting bigger and bigger. Maybe we’ll end up like France."

Tourists flock to the glaciers

Perhaps they will, in more ways than one. Tourism also is growing in Greenland, and "climate" tourism in particular is hot.

"Everybody wants to see the snow," Hammond said. "Everybody’s asking for it."

According to the country’s tourism bureau, 22,000 people visited Greenland on cruise ships in 1006—a 33 percent increase over the previous year. The number of people who came to the country via airplane, meanwhile, shot up from about 26,000 in 1999 to more than 35,000 last year. While most of the visitors were from Denmark, Germany and other European countries, Air Greenland last year started its first direct flight to the United States into Baltimore.

The dash for minerals also is posing challenges, Hammond said. The country opened its first gold mine recently, and Hammond noted that a 72 percent likelihood of oil fields in Greenland is heightening the country’s dream of becoming a top energy producer and providing a financial windfall for the country while bowing to environmental concerns.

"This affects our national economy strongly. We want to secure that," Hammond said, adding that "we want to ensure that risks are not taken. Nature is the most precious thing we have. It’s our culture and our identity."

Ultimately, Hammond said, the government of Greenland will need to take what she calls a "holistic" approach to climate change so it can prepare for changing ways of life while making way for new opportunities.

"This has to be taken advantage," she said. "We have to ensure that we are not only victims [of climate change] but also taking advantage of opportunities."