Earth Equity News

Unfrozen Tundra. By Bryan Walsh, Time, September 28, 2008. "Greenland is the front line in humanity's battle against climate change. The warming that is easy to dismiss elsewhere is undeniable on this 860,000-sq.-mi. island of fewer than 60,000 people. More and more of Greenland, whose frozen expanses are a living remnant of the last ice age, disappears each year, with as much as 150 billion metric tons of glacier vanishing annually, according to one estimate. If all the ice on Greenland were to melt tomorrow, global sea levels would rise more than 20 ft.--enough to swamp many coastal cities. Though no one thinks that will happen anytime soon, what keeps glaciologists awake at night is that thinking is not the same as knowing -- and no one can say with certainty what Greenland's fate will be... Dancing by helicopter above the mouth of the Jakobshavn Glacier, near the western coast of Greenland, you can make out veins of the purest blue meltwater running between folds of ice. What you can't see is Jakobshavn's inexorable slide toward the sea at 65 ft. to 115 ft. a day -- an alarming rate that has accelerated in recent years... Standing on a rocky hilltop in Greenland, watching the ice disappear [is hardly comforting]. As Jakobshavn gives way to the fjord, a stadium-size iceberg suddenly implodes, disintegrating like a collapsing skyscraper. I watch as a plume of mist fills the air where the iceberg once was, while the fjord churns on. And then I wonder, Just how much time do Greenland and the rest of us have before it's too late? That may be up to us -- and the heroes we choose to follow."