Since the nineteen-seventies, it has shed some six trillion tons of ice, and the rate of loss has been accelerating. Crevasses are appearing at higher elevations, glaciers are moving at non-glacial speeds, and large parts of the ice sheet appear to be twisting, like a writhing beast.
She visits the ice sheet, staying at the National Science Foundation’s research station, called Summit (“The view from Summit in all directions is pretty much the same: white”). She launches the stations daily weather balloon (“The balloon, filled with helium, flew out of my hands. I tried to follow it as it sailed over the ice, but I soon lost sight of it”). She talks with various scientists (e.g., Felix Schlüter, a German astrophysicist, and Zoe Courville, a snow scientist). She visits the village of Kangerlussuaq, where she meets climate scientist Marco Tedesco. She and Tedesco travel a dirt road to the edge of the Russell Glacier. In one of the piece’s most memorable passages, Kolbert writes,
When Tedesco first travelled the VW road, Russell ended in a dramatic wall of ice. Now the wall is gone, and the glacier looks deflated—more like an ice doormat. Tedesco compared visiting Russell to calling on a friend with a terminal illness. “You have to have the strength to say goodbye,” he said. “You see this and you say, ‘Oh, man, it’s happening really fast.’ ”
In my favorite part of Kolbert’s Greenland excursion, she flies to the town of Ilulissat, “which is sometimes called the ‘iceberg capital of the world.’ ” Ilulissat sits on Disko Bay, at the mouth of a very long fjord. Kolbert says, “Icebergs break off into the fjord and float along until they hit an underwater sill just south of town. The bigger icebergs get stuck on the sill, and other icebergs pile up behind them, in a great glacial traffic jam.” She walks along a boardwalk over a stretch of tundra that leads up to a rocky ridge. Kolbert writes,
From the ridgetop, there was a view directly onto the ice jam: a floating mountain range with slopes of pure white. The reflections of the icebergs quavered in the water, which was blue to the edge of purple. The smaller bergs were the size of a house; the bigger ones, I figured, were the size of Grand Central Terminal.
This vivid passage reminded me of another “Greenland” piece by Kolbert – her brilliant “A Song of Ice” (October 24, 2016). That piece also contains a wonderful description of the ice jam in the fjord near Ilulissat:
Towers of ice leaned against arches of ice, which pressed into palaces of ice. Some of the icebergs had smaller icebergs perched on top of them, like minarets. There were ice pyramids and what looked to me like an ice cathedral. The city of ice stretched on for miles. It was all a dazzling white except for pools of meltwater—that fantastic shade of Popsicle blue. Nothing moved, and, apart from the droning of the mosquitoes, the only sound was the patter of water running off the bergs.
Kolbert is fascinated by Greenland ice – by its beauty and by its disappearance. In her conclusion to “When the Ice Melts,” she writes,
Once the world’s remaining mountain glaciers disappear, they won’t be coming back. Nor will the coral reefs or the Amazon rain forest. If we cross the tipping point for the Greenland ice sheet, we may not even notice. And yet the world as we know it will be gone.
No comments:
Post a Comment