The Sermilik Fjord in Greenland: a chilling view of a warming world
The Sermilik fjord in Greenland: a chilling view of a warming world
‘We all live on the Greenland ice sheet now. Its fate is our fate’
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- The Guardian, Tuesday 1 September 2009
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The Sermilik fjord, where hundreds of icebergs are calving from Greenland's vast ice sheets. Photograph: Philippe Roy/Getty
It is calving season in the Arctic. A flotilla of icebergs, some as jagged as fairytale castles and others as smooth as dinosaur eggs, calve from the ice sheet that smothers Greenland and sail down the fjords. The journey of these sculptures of ice from glaciers to ocean is eerily beautiful and utterly terrifying.
The wall of ice that rises behind Sermilik fjord stretches for 1,500 miles (2,400km) from north to south and smothers 80% of this country. It has been frozen for 3m years. Now it is melting, far faster than the climate models predicted and far more decisively than any political action to combat our changing climate. If the Greenland ice sheet disappeared sea levels around the world would rise by seven metres, as 10% of the world’s fresh water is currently frozen here.
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