As temperatures rise, Greenland's glaciers and ice cap are shrinking. Environment Editor Frank McDonald visits the most visible victim of climate change
The first thing you see off the east coast of Greenland is the ice - vast swathes of it floating in the ocean, interspersed with icebergs fringed by glowing aquamarine, some so big they're like the one that sank Titanic. On the edges of this pack ice, thinner strings make patterns that curl with the currents and the wind.
Dark craggy mountains, randomly streaked white, rise up from the shoreline, but there is no real boundary between land, ice and water.
Patches of dense Arctic mist hang low over some of the fjords, and our Air Iceland Fokker 50 has to circle for half an hour before the pilot says he can finally see the runway at Kulusuk.
The jet-prop lands on the gravel airstrip, churning up a stream of dust in its wake. Kulusuk is a clearing house for air travel in southern Greenland and its waiting room is crowded with Inuit people and adventurers. Furry sealskin jackets are for sale in the airport's little shop and there are two Polar bearskins spreadeagled on the wall.
We wait our turn to get the eight-seater Air Alpha Bell helicopter to Tasiilaq, one of the few towns on the East Greenland coast. It goes back and forth, covering the short journey in 15 minutes. I am the last of the European Environment Agency's expedition to leave, along with four young Inuit, a Danish chap and seven sacks of potatoes.
Tasiilaq's harbour was ice-bound until last week, and the first supply ship of 2006 is due in next Wednesday. The hilly town's 2,000 inhabitants will spend the summer stocking up until the ice closes in yet again before the end of November, when the darkness of winter will also return. In the meantime, this is the land of the midnight sun.
At this time of year, the sun goes down at around 12.40am and rises at 2.20am. It is also warmer than usual for early summer, with highs of nearly 10 degrees during our visit, and all around there is evidence of global warming; the "summer melt" season is increasing by one day a year every year (8 per cent per decade since 1979).
As elsewhere in the Arctic, the glaciers around Tasiilaq are slipping away - dramatically.
The Helheim Glacier, half an hour away by helicopter, is cracking up as it advances slowly, imperceptibly, towards the sea. Satellite images show that it is shedding ice at an alarming rate and lost up to 1.5km (0.9 miles) of its length in the past year alone.
Fissures and crevasses have opened up in the glacier, creating a dazzling field of ice sculptures. Eventually, huge chunks break off and float into the ocean. We can hear the water trickling in little streams flowing through a nunatak (a bare rocky area protruding above the ice) where we land, or gushing in cascades from higher altitudes.
We had dressed in thermal underwear and layers of clothing for this trip to the great white wilderness, on the basis that it would be bitterly cold. But it isn't. The sun shines dazzlingly, it's at least seven degrees, and soon we're shedding the outer layers. On a tiny patch of clay beside a glinting stream a little saxifrage is blooming.
This is the front line of climate change, and Greenland is melting.
Four-fifths of this extraordinary land is covered by an ice cap that's up to three kilometres thick in places. If the average global temperature was to rise by just two degrees, this huge blanket of ice could turn into water, adding seven metres (23ft) to sea levels worldwide.
While this is unlikely to happen immediately, there is a growing scientific consensus that the Greenland ice cap will eventually disappear; the only question is when. There is also a risk that it could deliver a "double whammy" by dumping so much fresh water into the North Atlantic that it would divert the Gulf Stream further south.
THE CONSEQUENCES OF such a shift would be catastrophic for Ireland (as well as western Europe and the eastern United States) because it would give us winters twice as severe as the coldest on record; that's what Robert Gagosian, director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, told the World Economic Forum at Davos in 2003.
"The biggest signal of change was seeing the equivalent of a high tide mark when we flew up the valleys of two glaciers," says Prof Jacqueline McGlade, executive director of the European Environment Agency (EEA). "The difference in just 10 years between today's level of ice and where the glacier had scoured the rock is at least half a kilometre."
Annually, the overall net loss of ice from Greenland's glaciers is estimated at 50 cubic kilometres, or 50 billion tonnes. "That would be enough to fill an area the size of 150 soccer pitches to a height of one kilometre," according to oceanographer Ralph Rayner, chairman of Marine Information Alliance, who knows the Arctic region well.
Given that an average-sized iceberg might contain a million tonnes of water, what's surprising is that the current rate of glacier-melt is estimated to be adding just 0.2 millimetres a year to sea levels. The real danger is that the rate of melting will intensify in the coming decades, as it already has in the Alps - threatening ski resorts.
Sea ice around Greenland is also shrinking year by year. Projections derived from satellite images as well as data collected by military submarines point to a predominantly ice-free Arctic Ocean in summer by 2100.
One of the principal casualties of this trend are seal-hunting polar bears; their natural habitat on the pack ice is being eroded.
"The Arctic is subject to wholesale change," says Norwegian scientist Ola Johannessen, whose team won the European Commission's Descartes prize last year. One of their findings was that the Greenland ice cap is actually thickening due to more winter snowfall - partly attributable to global warming - even as it frays at the margins.
Johannessen is appalled that this has been twisted by a right-wing US think-tank, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which has received just over $2 million (€1.6 million) from Exxon Mobil (parent company of Esso). In TV commercials last May, it portrayed shrinking glaciers as a myth, ending with the silly slogan: "Carbon dioxide - they call it pollution, we call it life".
But climate change has been a real problem for Greenland. The onset of the "Little Ice Age" in medieval times forced the Vikings to abandon their settlements around 700 years ago. It was not until the late 18th century that the Danes arrived, establishing colonies on the west coast before turning their attention to East Greenland in 1892.
It is still one of the most isolated places in the world. There are only two small towns and seven villages along its 2,600km coastline, sandwiched between the polar sea ice and the awesome wilderness of the ice cap. What's needed most of all to survive here is endurance, says Anders Stenbakken, who runs the tourist office in Tasiilaq.
The culture of the Inuit around Ammassalik Fjord is based on hunting and fishing. In the winter, they go out with sleds drawn by huskies in search of seals and polar bears. But the warming of the Arctic has foreshortened the sledding season by five weeks, leaving the poor dogs even more idle and bored in summer than usual.
Day and night, they remain chained on open ground in Tasiilaq and other settlements, or on a nearby island; you can hear their cries in the evening in the stillness of the fjord. Seal meat is their staple diet, and they're fed three times a week. Local people eat plenty of seal, too, but I have to admit that I am too queasy to try it.
The early onset of summer ice-melt has led the Inuit to take to their boats and go fishing for capelin, a small salmon-type fish known locally as ammassat; they are caught in thousands and then either eaten or hung out to dry. From the helicopter, we spot two fishermen on the thinning ice just below Tasiilaq catching dozens with a rod and line.
On the steps of thesimple Lutheran church in Kunemiut, high above the fjord, local men keep a lookout at night for any sign of narwhal. As soon as these dolphin-like creatures are sighted, the fishermen put out in their boats, armed with rifles or harpoons; quotas for narwhal, whose tusks are traded, were only introduced two years ago.
Not far away, the white furry skins of two polar bears - a mother and cub - are hanging to dry in a slatted shed; the animals were shot two months ago on the pack ice. In accordance with local tradition, as Anders explains, it's not the hunter who shoots a polar bear that gets to keep the prized skin; it goes to whoever first spots the bear.
Given that the polar bear is now an endangered species, hunters are only allowed to shoot a total of 20 bears a year in the Ammassalik district, which covers an area of 243,000 sq km - roughly three times the size of Ireland. Rarely sighted by visitors or even local people, their meat is "tender and tasty when cooked well", according to Anders.
APART FROM THE threat of global warming, marine mammals in the Arctic have been found to be contaminated by relatively high levels of mercury, cadmium, zinc and PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) as a result of long-range pollution from Europe. "These environmental poisons are accumulating," says Hans Christian Florian, the local doctor.
Danish-born Hans first came to East Greenland on a trekking trip in 1984, when he was still a student, and returned to live in Tasiilaq in 1990, marrying an Innuit girl. What attracted him about the place was its remoteness, as well as "the people, the nature and the sense of adventure", all of which made life "much more exciting, challenging".
Greenland still attracts adventurers. We meet two young Norwegian guys who had trekked right across the ice cap from the west coast, covering a distance of 500km in 40 days. They had hauled two kayaks, but were forced to abandon them 15km from Tasiilaq because the sea ice was breaking up and there wasn't enough clear water to row in.
The great Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen was the first to make this crossing in 1888, travelling from east to west. In recent years, the Greenland ice cap was used as a set for the BBC TV series recreating Shackleton's Antarctic expedition in 1915 and for a docudrama on Scott's fateful race against Amundsen for the South Pole in 1911.
Despite its isolation, Tasilaq is connected to the outside world by a satellite dish perched on a windy hill above its weather station. The Hotel Nansen, a long wooden cabin, has broadband Wi-Fi and the town's superb school uses the Internet as a teaching aid. Nearly everyone seems to have TVs, DVD players, iPods and mobile phones.
But the local supermarket, where you can buy everything from rifles to underwear, is running low on foodstuffs and prices are high; it's an expensive business transporting potatoes by helicopter. Outside, and all over Tasiilaq, litter is strewn everywhere while the town's stinking, smouldering dump is located right at the edge of the fjord.
Oil tanks supply fuel for home heating, but the commissioning of a 1.2-megawatt hydro-power station last year means that the community is now self-sufficient for electricity - and there'll never be a shortage of water to keep it going. But if we want to avoid Greenland's ice coming down our way, what we really must do is wean ourselves off fossil fuels.