This is the Ilulissat Icefjord.
Miles upstream,
behind millions of tons of floating ice, is the Jakobshavn Glacier.
And if the Greenland ice sheet melts,
a good bit of the water will be coming down this way.
But a glacier isn’t a solid thing,
it’s not some monolithic block of ice that’s steadily melting.
Glaciers flow.
It’s a really counterintuitive concept,
because most of the world is used to thinking of ice in terms of frozen lakes,
where the ice isn’t going anywhere.
And let's be honest, this doesn’t look like it’s moving.
But glaciers aren’t static: they gain mass by having snow fall on them,
and they lose mass by a process called calving:
the front falls off and generates a stream of icebergs like this.
Like a river, the glacier flows downhill.
And the Jakobshavn glacier is one of the fastest and most productive in the world:
at the terminus, where the front falls off,
it can move at 20 metres a day.
And remember, that doesn’t mean the front of the ice
is moving towards us at 20 metres a day, just that on average,
the front bit of the ice is moving at that speed
when it falls off and forms these icebergs.
If a glacier is gaining mass, it will steadily advance,
spreading out into the sea beyond until enough of the front falls off
that it reaches equilibrium.
And if it’s losing mass,
because there’s not enough snow, or because it’s melting more quickly,
it will steadily retreat.
Remember, that’s not ice actually going into reverse,
it’s still flowing the same,
it’s just that the point where the front falls off is moving backwards.
It's still producing icebergs.
And the Jakobshavn glacier there?
It produces a lot of icebergs.
There’s a decent chance that the one that sank the Titanic came down here.
Now, I don’t want to debate climate change.
Some very shrill people in the comments probably will though,
so I’ll say this: sure, the data is noisy.
From the 1960s to 2000, the actual front of the glacier here barely moved —
and then in ten years, it retreated about the same amount
as it had in the entire 20th century.
But climate change is about trends, not events,
and if you don’t believe the enormous mountain of evidence by now,
then someone with no earth science credentials talking into a camera in the Arctic
isn’t going to convince you either.
And part of the reason for that is that it’s difficult to get across
the sheer scale of what I’m seeing here.
The camera can’t show you it.
Even standing here in person,
my brain is refusing to accept just how massive everything is.
And we're only seeing the 10, 20% of these above water.
Some glaciers will produce blocks of ice literally the size of Manhattan.
And yes, they’ll break up, yes,
they’ll settle down to be something we’re more used to,
but like so many processes on our planet,
this is on a scale that is pretty much unimaginable to humans.
It’s no wonder that the details of climate change are difficult to understand:
I’m standing here, watching the ice slowly flow,
and I still can’t get my head around this.
I'm here with Chris Hadfield's Generator Arctic, and so's she!
Hello!
That's Elmo Keep, she's writing wonderful profiles
of some of the people we meet out here.
Follow her on Twitter to see when they're published.
Goodbye!