Anyone following the mainstream news in recent months will have come to realise that, when it comes to global warming, climate change and sea-level rise, there’s a story that won’t go away. Greenland’s ice, according to one news source, is under a ‘death sentence’. While it’s tempting to think this is typical of headline writer hyperbole, the old axiom of there being no smoke without fire holds true. Jon Gertner, author of ‘The Ice at the End of the World’, agrees that, despite hysteria levels in the press, the problem facing our ice sheets is serious.

Greenland has recently been all over the news for the political reason that, as Gertner says, “for some reason President Trump thinks that Greenland is something he can actually buy”. While this might be something that Gertner doesn’t appear to take too seriously, he can confirm that “Greenland is melting”. Digging into the science behind the story, its significance is that this vast northern wilderness represents one of the final remnants of the last Ice Age in the northern hemisphere – vast ice sheets that once covered Canada and northern Europe.

“Those ice sheets,” explains Gertner, “shattered and melted into the ocean, raising sea levels dramatically.” There is potential for further sea level increase. According to a recent survey by Nasa, Greenland’s remaining ice has frozen within it the equivalent of an eight-metre rise in sea level. “And so, as this island’s ice sheet melts more and more each year – and this summer has been a tremendous melting event – we start to understand our connection to this far distant island.”

‘We now know that Greenland is just beginning its meltdown.’

Gertner began writing ‘The Ice at the End of the World’ in 2012, a year he describes as “a wake-up call” to those wondering about the environment and “the profounder effects of climate change. We can look at climate change in all sorts of ways, but in 2012 Greenland had a stupendous melting.” If we want to see our future, he says, “we just have to look to the north to the Arctic, which is warming at about twice the rate of the rest of the world”. This future contains a real threat for the 40 per cent of the world’s population that lives on the coast. Given that most major cities are built along major rivers, the scale of the problem is, as Gertner puts it, “not trivial. When you look at Greenland as probably the largest single contributor to sea level rise during the 21st century, we can see that the problem is actually somewhere between ‘very serious’ and ‘existential’.”

He says that we don’t know at what level the sea will be by the year 2100. Estimates vary from 30-150cm higher, while “there are extreme predictions based on some theories of how ice sheets collapse that say we might get above that. What would happen to London or New York? They’d survive because they have so much money and infrastructure. But when you look beyond 2100, it’s not as though the sea will somehow stop rising or the ice sheets will stop melting. We can see this trajectory through our computer models.” 

‘The Ice at the End of the World’ is Gertner’s assessment of how exploration and science have come together over the past two centuries to give us an understanding of Greenland and, by extrapolation, its influence on global climate and environmental issues. “Greenland is a place at the edge of our imagination. It’s a place we barely think about. And yet, if we look a little deeper at this island and its ice sheet, we can gain a better understanding of how exploration has led us into this modern age of science, and how technology, decade by decade, has helped us to unlock the secrets of places that were barely understood.” On the one hand, says Gertner, “when I write about Greenland, I write about a place that captured my imagination and could capture the imagination of many people who care about how science has unfolded, and how we have come to know what we know about these distant places. On the other hand, it lends us an understanding of a world and an ice sheet that will become increasingly important to our lives.”

There are currently “more than several” paleoclimatology ice-core experiments taking place in Greenland. “This is where scientists drill into the ice – both on a shallow scale and right down to the bedrock – to understand temperature patterns and ice movements within the ice sheet, to try to understand the past.” But “perhaps more important” is the remote-sensing work being conducted by satellite and aircraft, “monitoring changes in the ice that we are unable to perceive by just doing fieldwork. These experiments allow us to see the movement of enormous glaciers, their advance and recession. They help us to understand how much of the ice sheet has been lost over a given time.” It is remote-sensing technology in particular, with its real-time snapshots of the present, says Gertner, that “has changed the way we think about the Arctic. It provides us with the power to see things we could never see before.” Putting data collected in the field “into computer models allows us to see the future”.

Going back to the ‘death sentence’ headline in the popular press, Gertner says that there’s a problem with how environmental news is covered in the mainstream news. “There’s this notion that Greenland is in a meltdown. And I actually think that’s incorrect. When we look at ice loss in terms of billions of tonnes, according to surveys by people such as Nasa, that’s important. But we haven’t seen anything yet. If we look at computer projections of what air and ocean temperatures will be like, we now know that Greenland is just beginning its meltdown, and I think it’s an important distinction.”

Gertner says that while he would not describe the immediate future as “apocalyptic”, there is still a need to understand the context of the scientific findings that form the basis of mainstream news articles on ice loss in Greenland. “If we look decades or even centuries ahead, we are looking at a process that is probably irrevocable. We are poised at a critical juncture and we’re not sure what’s going to happen. But it’s not a meltdown. It’s a hint of a meltdown.”

‘The Ice at the End of the World’ by Jon Gertner is published by Icon Books, £18.99

Anyone following the mainstream news in recent months will have come to realise that, when it comes to global warming, climate change and sea-level rise, there’s a story that won’t go away. Greenland’s ice, according to one news source, is under a ‘death sentence’. While it’s tempting to think this is typical of headline writer hyperbole, the old axiom of there being no smoke without fire holds true. Jon Gertner, author of ‘The Ice at the End of the World’, agrees that, despite hysteria levels in the press, the problem facing our ice sheets is serious.

Greenland has recently been all over the news for the political reason that, as Gertner says, “for some reason President Trump thinks that Greenland is something he can actually buy”. While this might be something that Gertner doesn’t appear to take too seriously, he can confirm that “Greenland is melting”. Digging into the science behind the story, its significance is that this vast northern wilderness represents one of the final remnants of the last Ice Age in the northern hemisphere – vast ice sheets that once covered Canada and northern Europe.

“Those ice sheets,” explains Gertner, “shattered and melted into the ocean, raising sea levels dramatically.” There is potential for further sea level increase. According to a recent survey by Nasa, Greenland’s remaining ice has frozen within it the equivalent of an eight-metre rise in sea level. “And so, as this island’s ice sheet melts more and more each year – and this summer has been a tremendous melting event – we start to understand our connection to this far distant island.”

‘We now know that Greenland is just beginning its meltdown.’

Gertner began writing ‘The Ice at the End of the World’ in 2012, a year he describes as “a wake-up call” to those wondering about the environment and “the profounder effects of climate change. We can look at climate change in all sorts of ways, but in 2012 Greenland had a stupendous melting.” If we want to see our future, he says, “we just have to look to the north to the Arctic, which is warming at about twice the rate of the rest of the world”. This future contains a real threat for the 40 per cent of the world’s population that lives on the coast. Given that most major cities are built along major rivers, the scale of the problem is, as Gertner puts it, “not trivial. When you look at Greenland as probably the largest single contributor to sea level rise during the 21st century, we can see that the problem is actually somewhere between ‘very serious’ and ‘existential’.”

He says that we don’t know at what level the sea will be by the year 2100. Estimates vary from 30-150cm higher, while “there are extreme predictions based on some theories of how ice sheets collapse that say we might get above that. What would happen to London or New York? They’d survive because they have so much money and infrastructure. But when you look beyond 2100, it’s not as though the sea will somehow stop rising or the ice sheets will stop melting. We can see this trajectory through our computer models.” 

‘The Ice at the End of the World’ is Gertner’s assessment of how exploration and science have come together over the past two centuries to give us an understanding of Greenland and, by extrapolation, its influence on global climate and environmental issues. “Greenland is a place at the edge of our imagination. It’s a place we barely think about. And yet, if we look a little deeper at this island and its ice sheet, we can gain a better understanding of how exploration has led us into this modern age of science, and how technology, decade by decade, has helped us to unlock the secrets of places that were barely understood.” On the one hand, says Gertner, “when I write about Greenland, I write about a place that captured my imagination and could capture the imagination of many people who care about how science has unfolded, and how we have come to know what we know about these distant places. On the other hand, it lends us an understanding of a world and an ice sheet that will become increasingly important to our lives.”

There are currently “more than several” paleoclimatology ice-core experiments taking place in Greenland. “This is where scientists drill into the ice – both on a shallow scale and right down to the bedrock – to understand temperature patterns and ice movements within the ice sheet, to try to understand the past.” But “perhaps more important” is the remote-sensing work being conducted by satellite and aircraft, “monitoring changes in the ice that we are unable to perceive by just doing fieldwork. These experiments allow us to see the movement of enormous glaciers, their advance and recession. They help us to understand how much of the ice sheet has been lost over a given time.” It is remote-sensing technology in particular, with its real-time snapshots of the present, says Gertner, that “has changed the way we think about the Arctic. It provides us with the power to see things we could never see before.” Putting data collected in the field “into computer models allows us to see the future”.

Going back to the ‘death sentence’ headline in the popular press, Gertner says that there’s a problem with how environmental news is covered in the mainstream news. “There’s this notion that Greenland is in a meltdown. And I actually think that’s incorrect. When we look at ice loss in terms of billions of tonnes, according to surveys by people such as Nasa, that’s important. But we haven’t seen anything yet. If we look at computer projections of what air and ocean temperatures will be like, we now know that Greenland is just beginning its meltdown, and I think it’s an important distinction.”

Gertner says that while he would not describe the immediate future as “apocalyptic”, there is still a need to understand the context of the scientific findings that form the basis of mainstream news articles on ice loss in Greenland. “If we look decades or even centuries ahead, we are looking at a process that is probably irrevocable. We are poised at a critical juncture and we’re not sure what’s going to happen. But it’s not a meltdown. It’s a hint of a meltdown.”

‘The Ice at the End of the World’ by Jon Gertner is published by Icon Books, £18.99