Disappearing glacier?

A Nuuk newspaper, AG, recently reported that the Sermeq Kujalleq glacier in Ilulissat, one of the most active glaciers in the world, had receded by more than five kilometres in the past two years.

“There is a risk that the glacier will stop calving into the ice fiord,” AG said.

The news came just two months after UNESCO placed the Ilulissat fiord on the World Heritage List.

“The combination of a huge ice sheet and the dramatic sounds of a fast-moving glacial ice stream calving into a fiord covered by icebergs makes for a dramatic and awe-inspiring natural phenomenon,” the United Nations’ cultural body said.

The Ilulissat ice fiord “is an outstanding example of a stage in the earth’s history: the last ice age of the quaternary period.” The glacier is one of only a few whose ice cap reaches all the way down to the sea, with more than 35 cubic kilometres of ice moving down the ice sheet into the fiord each year.

Ilulissat, population 5,000, draws visits from half of the 15,000 tourists who visit Greenland every year.

“The glacier has receded a lot since 2002, which is very surprising and new since it had been relatively stable, almost unchanged since the 1950s,” glacier expert Henrik Hoejmark Thomsen of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland told AFP news service.

Satellite photos from 2003 show that the glacier has regressed by five to seven kilometres, a shrinkage that has continued, according to hunters and helicopter pilots who have flown over the region recently.

“However, there is no danger that the glacier will stop producing ice slides, even if it recedes,” Thomsen said. “The regression and expansion of the glacier is not an exceptional phenomenon. In 1860, it reached the middle of the Ilulissat fiord, and 5,000 years before that it had receded by 20 kilometers.”