Greenland ice cap shrinks while leaders fiddle

Greenland’s Ilulissat glacier, a United Nations heritage site, has shrunk by over 10 kilometres in just a few years.

“We are witnesses to one of the most striking examples of climate change in the Arctic,” U.S. climate change expert Robert Corell said during a recent helicopter flight over the glacier.

Corell said the lower extremity of the glacier “has receded by more than 10 kilometers in two or three years after having been relatively stable since the 1960s.”

Corell, a senior fellow with the American Meteorological Society in Washington D.C. and chairman of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, took 22 environment ministers and other officials from around the world, who met recently in Ilulissat for a conference on global warming, on a tour of the glacier.

“We can’t find any more concrete example of Arctic warming, which is twice as fast as in any other part of the world,” Corell told Agences France Presse.

Corell said the glacier shrank by seven kilometres in a 12-month period from 2002 to 2003.

Greenland’s ice cap could melt within a few hundred years, raising the water level of the world’s oceans by six to seven metres, threatening more than 1.2 billion people who live within 30 kilometres of ocean shorelines.