Postcard From Illulisat - Time

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In some places of the world, that change is happening more quickly than in others, so quickly that our "fast-thinking human mind," as the University of Copenhagen geologist Minik Rosing says, can almost catch it. One of those places is the coastal town of Ilulissat, the last stop on our climate tour of Greenland. It's home to the Ilulissat ice fjord, a basin-shaped wound in the rocky coast, through which the massive Sermeq Kujalleq glacier churns toward the sea. As the glacier moves — at the hardly glacial speed of over 100 ft. a day — the ice melts and cracks into cathedrals of blue and white that bob in the harbor beyond the isfledsbanken, or iceberg bank. Sermeq Kujalleq, which is fed by the 1.8 million cubic miles of solid ice that cover central Greenland, is the most productive glacier on the island, calving icebergs with dramatic regularity. The iceberg that sank the Titanic may well have come from Sermeq, and looking upon Ilulissat's harbor, choked with sheer cliffs of ice that dwarf even the stately cruise liners, I can believe it.

We take a boat out for a tour amid the ice. In the Arctic summer Ilulissat is cool but not cold, maybe 65� F, but as we near the ice fjord, the temperature drops, as if cold is emanating from the icebergs themselves. As we leave the port, at first we encounter a slurry of ice in the water, which is sapphire blue because of the cold. But soon we near the giants, and they are easily over 100 ft. tall — and that's just above the water. (More than 80% of an iceberg's mass is beneath the surface, and the water in Ilulissat's port is more than a mile deep.) We can't get too close to the big icebergs — as they melt all the time in the salty sea, without warning, they can crack and cave in, loosing waves big enough to topple or even crush small boats. But even from a distance, they are breathtaking: natural cathedrals of white, lined by unmappable crevices, leaking pure glacial meltwater that pours into the sea as if from a fountain. It's easy to see why UNESCO made Ilulissat a World Heritage site and why tourist numbers have been growing steadily.

But we're not here as tourists. After the boat docks, our group boards a helicopter piloted by a sprite of a Greenlandic woman for a tour of the fjord and glacier, which is retreating fast. Before we leave, we are shown a map of the glacier. As pressure from the central ice cap builds up behind the glacier, it pushes its way to the sea through the ice fjord. The glacier ends where melting causes icebergs to calve off, and we see that each year the glacier has retreated farther and farther away from the sea. Sermeq Kujalleq is shrinking so fast (on a geological scale) that we can almost see it. This is global warming — as close as we can get to it — in action. There's no doubt here, no room for skeptics: temperatures have warmed in Greenland, and as they have warmed, the ice has melted. It is as simple as that.

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What matters is not that change is happening but that it is happening so fast. In Ilulissat, the ice that once covered much of the sea in the winter and allowed hunting, fishing and travel by dogsled comes no longer. In less than a human lifetime — barely the blink of an eye in geologic time — a way of life millenniums old will be lost here. Elsewhere we may see temperate and fertile areas turn dry and barren in the same time period. What we've known and lived with may no longer exist — and we may not be able to adapt in time for what is coming. Change is painful, even if we can't see it happening.

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http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1829365,00.html