[Rhodes22-list] More on global warming.

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LIVERPOOL LAND, Greenland (Jan. 16) — Flying over  snow-capped peaks and into 
a thick fog, the helicopter set down on a barren  strip of rocks between two 
glaciers. A dozen bags of supplies, a rifle and a can  of cooking gas were 
tossed out onto the cold ground. Then, with engines whining,  the helicopter 
lifted off, snow and fog swirling in the rotor wash.   
Changing  Coastlines 
When it  had disappeared over the horizon, no sound remained but the howling 
of the  Arctic wind. 

“It feels a little like the days of the old explorers,  doesn’t it?” Dennis 
Schmitt said. 

Mr. Schmitt, a 60-year-old explorer  from Berkeley, Calif., had just landed 
on a newly revealed island 400 miles  north of the Arctic Circle in eastern 
Greenland. It was a moment of triumph: he  had discovered the island on an ocean 
voyage in September 2005. Now, a year  later, he and a small expedition team 
had returned to spend a week climbing  peaks, crossing treacherous glaciers and 
documenting animal and plant life.  

Despite its remote location, the island would almost certainly have been  
discovered, named and mapped almost a century ago when explorers like  
Jean-Baptiste Charcot and Philippe, Duke of Orléans, charted these coastlines.  Would 
have been discovered had it not been bound to the coast by glacial ice.  

Maps of the region show a mountainous peninsula covered with glaciers.  The 
island’s distinct shape — like a hand with three bony fingers pointing north  —
 looks like the end of the peninsula. 

Now, where the maps showed only  ice, a band of fast-flowing seawater ran 
between a newly exposed shoreline and  the aquamarine-blue walls of a retreating 
ice shelf. The water was littered with  dozens of icebergs, some as large as 
half an acre; every hour or so, several  more tons of ice fractured off the 
shelf with a thunderous crack and an  earth-shaking rumble. 

All over Greenland and the Arctic, rising  temperatures are not simply 
melting ice; they are changing the very geography of  coastlines. Nunataks — “
lonely mountains” in Inuit — that were encased in the  margins of Greenland’s ice 
sheet are being freed of their age-old bonds,  exposing a new chain of 
islands, and a new opportunity for Arctic explorers to  write their names on the 
landscape. 

“We are already in a new era of  geography,” said the Arctic explorer Will 
Steger. “This phenomenon — of an  island all of a sudden appearing out of 
nowhere and the ice melting around it —  is a real common phenomenon now.” 

In August, Mr. Steger discovered his  own new island off the coast of the 
Norwegian island of Svalbard, high in the  polar basin. Glaciers that had 
surrounded it when his ship passed through only  two years earlier were gone this 
year, leaving only a small island alone in the  open ocean.  
“We saw  it ourselves up there, just how fast the ice is going,” he said. 

With  27,555 miles of coastline and thousands of fjords, inlets, bays and 
straits,  Greenland has always been hard to map. Now its geography is becoming 
obsolete  almost as soon as new maps are created. 

Hans Jepsen is a cartographer at  the Geological Survey of Denmark and 
Greenland, which produces topographical  maps for mining and oil companies. 
(Greenland is a largely self-governing region  of Denmark.) Last summer, he spotted 
several new islands in an area where a  massive ice shelf had broken up. Mr. 
Jepsen was unaware of Mr. Schmitt’s  discovery, and an old aerial photograph in 
his files showed the peninsula  intact. 

“Clearly, the new island was detached from the mainland when the  connecting 
glacier-bridge retreated southward,” Mr. Jepsen said, adding that  future maps 
would take note of the change. 

The sudden appearance of the  islands is a symptom of an ice sheet going into 
retreat, scientists say.  Greenland is covered by 630,000 cubic miles of ice, 
enough water to raise global  sea levels by 23 feet. 

Carl Egede Boggild, a professor of snow-and-ice  physics at the University 
Center of Svalbard, said Greenland could be losing  more than 80 cubic miles of 
ice per year. 

“That corresponds to three  times the volume of all the glaciers in the Alps,”
 Dr. Boggild said. “If you  lose that much volume you’d definitely see new 
islands appear.” 

He  discovered an island himself a year ago while flying over northwestern  
Greenland. “Suddenly I saw an island with glacial ice on it,” he said. “I 
looked  at the map and it should have been a nunatak, but the present ice margin 
was  about 10 kilometers away. So I can say that within the last five years the 
ice  margin had retreated at least 10 kilometers.” 

The abrupt acceleration of  melting in Greenland has taken climate scientists 
by surprise. Tidewater  glaciers, which discharge ice into the oceans as they 
break up in the process  called calving, have doubled and tripled in speed 
all over Greenland. Ice  shelves are breaking up, and summertime “glacial 
earthquakes” have been detected  within the ice sheet. 

“The general thinking until very recently was that  ice sheets don’t react 
very quickly to climate,” said Martin Truffer, a  glaciologist at the 
University of Alaska at Fairbanks. “But that thinking is  changing right now, because we
’re seeing things that people have thought are  impossible.” 

A study in The Journal of Climate last June observed that  Greenland had 
become the single largest contributor to global sea-level rise.  

Until recently, the consensus of climate scientists was that the impact  of 
melting polar ice sheets would be negligible over the next 100 years. Ice  
sheets were thought to be extremely slow in reacting to atmospheric warming. The  
2001 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, widely 
considered  to be an authoritative scientific statement on the potential impacts of 
_global warming_ (javascript:;)  , based its  conclusions about sea-level rise on 
a computer model that predicted a slow onset  of melting in Greenland. 

“When you look at the ice sheet, the models  didn’t work, which puts us on 
shaky ground,” said Richard Alley, a geosciences  professor at Pennsylvania 
State University. 

There is no consensus on how  much Greenland’s ice will melt in the near 
future, Dr. Alley said, and no  computer model that can accurately predict the 
future of the ice sheet. Yet  given the acceleration of tidewater-glacier 
melting, a sea-level rise of a foot  or two in the coming decades is entirely 
possible, he said. That bodes ill for  island nations and those who live near the 
coast. 

“Even a foot rise is a  pretty horrible scenario,” said Stephen P. 
Leatherman, director of the  Laboratory for Coastal Research at Florida International 
University in Miami.  

On low-lying and gently sloping land like coastal river deltas, a  sea-level 
rise of just one foot would send water thousands of feet inland.  Hundreds of 
millions of people worldwide make their homes in such deltas;  virtually all 
of coastal Bangladesh lies in the delta of the Ganges River. Over  the long 
term, much larger sea-level rises would render the world’s coastlines  
unrecognizable, creating a whole new series of islands. 

“Here in Miami,”  Dr. Leatherman said, “we’re going to have an ocean on 
both sides of us.”  

Such ominous implications are not lost on Mr. Schmitt, who says he hopes  
that the island he discovered in Greenland in September will become an  
international symbol of the effects of climate change. Mr. Schmitt, who speaks  Inuit, 
has provisionally named it Uunartoq Qeqertoq: the warming island.  

Global warming has profoundly altered the nature of polar exploration,  said 
Mr. Schmitt, who in 40 years has logged more than 100 Arctic expeditions.  
Routes once pioneered on a dogsled are routinely paddled in a kayak now; many  
features, like the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf in Greenland’s northwest, have  
disappeared for good. 

“There is a dark side to this,” he said about the  new island. “We felt the 
exhilaration of discovery. We were exploring something  new. But of course, 
there was also something scary about what we did there. We  were looking in the 
face of these changes, and all of us were thinking of the  dire consequences.” 
 
Copyright ©  2007 _The New York Times  Company_ (http://www.nytimes.com
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2007-01-16 09:43:21 
 
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