Category: Featured

The thunder of icebergs crashing into the turquoise sea of eastern Greenland is the sound of one of the planet’s most important ecosystems teetering on the edge of collapse.

As the ice melts, the hunters in the village of Ittoqqortoormiit — home to one of the last Inuit hunting communities — worry where they will get water.

Greenland’s ice sheets may hold one 12th of the world’s fresh water — enough to raise the sea level up seven metres (23 feet) if they were to melt — but climate change is already threatening the village’s supply.

Cold winters, robust ice and snow are vital for both food and water for the Inuit of the Scoresby Sound, who live deeply intertwined with the natural world.

But temperatures in the Arctic are rising up to four times faster than the global average.

On a headland of barren tundra around 500 kilometres (310 miles) from the nearest settlement, Ittoqqortoormiit’s 350 people get their fresh water from a river fed by a glacier that is melting fast.

“In a few years it’s gone,” said Erling Rasmussen of the local utility company Nukissiorfiit.

“The glaciers are smaller and smaller,” he said after the warmest July ever recorded at Summit Camp atop Greenland’s ice sheet.

“In the future we may have to get drinking water from the ocean,” Rasmussen added.

With melting ice for water costly and unreliable, other isolated Greenland communities are already turning to desalination.

– Thinning ice and hungry bears –

The Scoresby Sound — the biggest fjord system on the planet — is free of ice only for a month a year, with the locals within it relying on the meat provided by the hunters to survive the long polar night.

Cargo ships only get to Ittoqqortoormiit, at the mouth of the fjords, once a year. The colossal drifting icebergs crowding the narrow passages are a challenge to even the most seasoned sailors.

“We need our own meat. We cannot only buy Danish frozen meat,” said Jorgen Juulut Danielsen, a teacher and the village’s former mayor.

But as rising temperatures weaken the ice, traditional seal hunting by stalking their breathing holes on the ice has become progressively more difficult and dangerous for the local hunters.

Peter Arqe-Hammeken almost lost his wife and two children when the ice gave way under their snowmobile when they were out hunting in January, when the temperature was 20 below zero Centigrade (-4 Fahrenheit).

His wife ruptured her biceps getting the oldest child, aged 12, from the water.

Less snow also makes it difficult for the dog sleds the hunters rely on.

And it is not only humans who are facing challenges. The weakening sea ice is also increasingly pushing hungry polar bears to search for food within the settlement, locals report.

“They come to land near the village, so people have to be careful,” Danielsen said.

– Polar cod in question –

Framed by the rust-coloured mountains of Rode Fjord, the breathtaking blue walls of glaciers that rise from the sea in the Inuit hunting grounds are vital to the ecosystem.

The extreme conditions mean the fjord is among the least studied places on the planet, with parts of it blanketed in icebergs.

But after five years of meticulous planning, the French scientific initiative Greenlandia is rushing to document this front line of climate change before it is too late.

“You hear about global warming, but here you see it,” expedition leader Vincent Hilaire told AFP on board their sailing boat, Kamak.

Caroline Bouchard, senior scientist at the Greenland Climate Research Centre in Nuuk, fears that the receding glaciers will make the Scoresby Sound “a less rich ecosystem”.

Glaciers that terminate in the sea trigger “upwelling” — pushing the nutrient-rich water from the bottom of the fjord upwards with their cold meltwater.

But as the glaciers melt, they recede inland and the ecosystem loses these nutrients for the plankton that feed the polar cod, which in turn feed the seal and bear that the Inuit of Ittoqqortoormiit rely on.

– Catastrophic consequences –

On the deck of Kamak, Bouchard checked the contents of her nets, as the bright Arctic sunlight illuminated the myriad of sealife on her Petri dish.

Among the plankton and krill, the number of cod larvae in her samples has dropped from 53 last year to only eight this summer.

While Bouchard said thorough analysis is required to determine the reasons for the decline, the figures are unexpectedly low.

“If you suddenly crash the polar cod population, what’s going to happen with the ring seal, what’s going to happen with the polar bear?” she said.

The potential collapse of polar cod could have catastrophic consequences for the local population that relies on both for their food from hunting.

“It’s not just Ittoqqortoormiit that we lose. It’s a unique way of life,” Bouchard said.

– Red algae melting glaciers –

New research conducted on the Greenlandia expedition offers grim portents for the future of the glaciers. In the warming fjord, a reddish hue is spreading across the ice that has been dubbed “blood snow”.

It is from a snow algae only formally discovered in 2019, Sanguina nivaloides, which develops a red or orange pigment to save it from the sun. But the pigment also lowers the reflectivity of the snow and speeds up melting.

Once aware of it, even an inexperienced observer can see how the crimson veil blankets extensive sections of the snow in the fjord.

Researchers say it is responsible for 12 percent of the total annual surface melt of the Greenland ice sheet, a “colossal” 32 billion tons of ice.

With the algae seemingly spreading, scientists see the risk of a vicious circle — rising temperatures speeding glacier melt and promoting the growth of the algae, which further accelerates the melting.

– ‘We need to wake up’ –

“We are facing a catastrophe,” said Eric Marechal, a director of research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS).

To scientifically demonstrate a phenomenon on the scale of the algae, 30 years of data is needed, he said, a luxury the world might not have.

“The risk we have here is the disappearance of the complete ecosystem,” he said. “Can this process be stopped in time? I don’t think so.”

Approaching the towering glacier cascading down a steep valley in Vikingebugt, expedition leader Hilaire pointed his rifle to a trail left in the mud by a polar bear.

For Marechal, making the challenging trek into bear country is a risk worth taking to sample the red snow draping the glacier.

His team at CNRS and the Snow Research Centre of Meteo-France are rushing to collect field samples in Greenland and retrieve historical satellite data to gain a deeper understanding of the algae’s behaviour.

“We need to wake up and address this question seriously,” Marechal said. “What is happening in Greenland (is key to) the disruption of the global water cycle, and the major melting that is causing the oceans to rise.”

©AFP2023

Growing calls for the world to come to grips with the many ways that global warming affects human health have prompted the first day dedicated to the issue at crunch UN climate talks starting next week.

Extreme heat, air pollution and the increasing spread of deadly infectious diseases are just some of the reasons why the World Health Organization has called climate change the single biggest health threat facing humanity.

Global warming must be limited to the Paris Agreement target of 1.5 degrees Celsius “to avert catastrophic health impacts and prevent millions of climate change-related deaths”, according to the WHO.

However, under current national carbon-cutting plans, the world is on track to warm up to 2.9C this century, the UN said this week.

While no one will be completely safe from the effects of climate change, experts expect that most at risk will be children, women, the elderly, migrants and people in less developed countries which have emitted the least planet-warming greenhouse gases.

On December 3, the COP28 negotiations in Dubai will host the first “health day” ever held at the climate negotiations.

– Extreme heat –

This year is widely expected to be the hottest on record. And as the world continues to warm, even more frequent and intense heatwaves are expected to follow.

Heat is believed to have caused more than 70,000 deaths in Europe during summer last year, researchers said this week, revising the previous number up from 62,000.

Worldwide, people were exposed to an average of 86 days of life-threatening temperatures last year, according to the Lancet Countdown report earlier this week.

The number of people over 65 who died from heat rose by 85 percent from 1991-2000 to 2013-2022, it added.

And by 2050, more than five times more people will die from the heat each year under a 2C warming scenario, the Lancet Countdown projected.

More droughts will also drive rising hunger. Under the scenario of 2C warming by the end of the century, 520 million more people will experience moderate or severe food insecurity by 2050.

Meanwhile, other extreme weather events such as storms, floods and fires will continue to threaten the health of people across the world.

– Air pollution –

Almost 99 percent of the world’s population breathes air that exceeds the WHO’s guidelines for air pollution.

Outdoor air pollution driven by fossil fuel emissions kills more than four million people every year, according to the WHO.

It increases the risk of respiratory diseases, strokes, heart disease, lung cancer, diabetes and other health problems, posing a threat that has been compared to tobacco.

The damage is caused partly by PM2.5 microparticles, which are mostly from fossil fuels. People breathe these tiny particles into their lungs, where they can then enter the bloodstream.

While spikes in air pollution, such as extremes seen in India’s capital New Delhi earlier this month, trigger respiratory problems and allergies, long-term exposure is believed to be even more harmful.

However it is not all bad news.

The Lancet Countdown report found that deaths from air pollution due to fossil fuels have fallen 16 percent since 2005, mostly due to efforts to reduce the impact of coal burning.

– Infectious diseases –

The changing climate means that mosquitoes, birds and mammals will roam beyond their previous habitats, raising the threat that they could spread infectious diseases with them.

Mosquito-borne diseases that pose a greater risk of spreading due to climate change include dengue, chikungunya, Zika, West Nile virus and malaria.

The transmission potential for dengue alone will increase by 36 percent with 2C warming, the Lancet Countdown report warned.

Storms and floods create stagnant water that are breeding grounds for mosquitoes, and also increase the risk of water-borne diseases such as cholera, typhoid and diarrhoea.

Scientists also fear that mammals straying into new areas could share diseases with each other, potentially creating new viruses that could then jump over to humans.

– Mental health –

Worrying about the present and future of our warming planet has also provoked rising anxiety, depression and even post-traumatic stress — particularly for people already struggling with these disorders, psychologists have warned.

In the first 10 months of the year, people searched online for the term “climate anxiety” 27 times more than during the same period in 2017, according to data from Google Trends cited by the BBC this week.