Greenpeace Expedition Documents Disappearing Greenland Glacier

First-hand scientific data of the fast-vanishing Petermann Glacier in Greenland's remote North will soon be available, thanks to Greenpeace.

The organization set off on a three-month climate impacts expedition on June 23, just as a Manhattan-sized iceberg started hemorrhaging off the ancient Petermann mass.

The group, and its team of independent scientists, will document the disintegration of the world's northernmost glacier and conduct additional research on the accelerating polar melt.

"Travelling to Petermann Glacier is a rare opportunity to visit a remote, hard to reach location at the top of the world, and a chance to make observations usually well beyond the capabilities of conventional science," said Jason Box, a glacier expert at the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University and member of the Greenpeace expedition.

The Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise, an old sealing vessel, sailed from Nuuk, the capital of Greenland. After barreling North along Greenland's West Coast, the 30-member crew reached the edge of the Petermann Glacier on June 29.

A time-lapse camera was installed on the ice to track the glacial smashup through slow-motion images.

The data should help shine a spotlight on Greenland, the world's ground zero of global warming, where melting glaciers contain enough ice to eventually raise sea levels around the world by as much as 23 feet.

"This is a chance to help us to better understand how Greenland's ice sheet and glaciers react to climate change, as well as the implications for global sea level rise," Box said.

The expedition is also a chance to publicize the specter of climate change before UN climate talks in Copenhagen in December, which must produce a successor treaty to the expiring Kyoto Protocol.

The Petermann Glacier is the Northern Hemisphere's biggest floating glacier and a sentinel of danger in a warming world.

From July 10 to July 24, 2008, a chunk of it half the size of Manhattan cracked off. That piece is now a floating monolith in Canadian waters. Before that, the last major losses of ice from the glacier occurred between 2000 and 2001.

In August, the Byrd Polar Research Center spotted more giant gashes in the glacier on satellite images, adding to evidence that the atrophy is indeed a sign of global warming, not normal glacier stress.

To get to Petermann Glacier, the Greenpeace team had to pass the Nares Strait, the body of water that divides northwest Greenland from Canada’s Ellesmere Island. They were warned the chances of crossing were 50-50 due to seasonal floods of sea ice.

Instead, the group "encountered no ice worth talking about," Dave Walsh, who is onboard the Arctic Sunrise, wrote on the Greenpeace blog.

... the route is usually choked with sea ice well into the summer, with most icebreakers only making the passage in August. I expected to fall asleep at night listening to ice clunking and grazing along the hull of the ship.
It wasn’t to be, however – we encountered no ice worth talking about.

For reasons that are unclear – but may be related to warming sea temperatures and high winds – the sea ice in Nares Strait never 'consolidated' last winter, for the first in 32 years of records. This means that the ice never really properly fused together, and remained thin. The last time there was any proper sea ice Nares Strait was March 2008. While we can’t say what exactly is causing this – we can certainly say that it’s evidence of a climate that is changing.

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