It’s nearly 11pm in Ilulissat, where the summer sun never sets, and Søren Stach Nielsen is going for a walk. The trail runs along a rocky outcrop next to the ocean, where the giant icebergs that give this town its name — Ilulissat means “iceberg” in Greenlandic — are glowing pink under the midnight sun.
Nielsen recently took up a challenging new job, and the evening walks have become a habit. A bespectacled civil servant and former social-science researcher, he is now chief executive of this part of north-west Greenland, the Avannaata region, which is about as big as France but contains fewer than 11,000 people.
It’s one of the harshest environments inhabited by humans in the world, and it is at the front line of global warming. “If you want to see climate change with your own eyes, this is the place you can go,” Nielsen says.
Temperatures here have risen more than twice as fast as the rest of the planet because the Arctic sea ice is retreating. The thunder of icebergs breaking often rumbles through the village.
“If you are looking at it in a 20-year span, it is a kind of shock,” says Nielsen, pointing to shifts in the local economy. But it is not a climate-induced recession that makes his job difficult. In fact, his main challenge is one most other bureaucrats would gladly trade for: the town of Ilulissat is undergoing a rapid economic surge as it gets warmer.
“There are two boom towns in Greenland: there is the capital Nuuk and there is Ilulissat,” explains Nielsen, digging out a business card emblazoned with sled dogs and halibut — the municipality’s coat of arms.
Fishing and hunting have been the main economic drivers of Ilulissat since it was established as a Danish trading post more than 250 years ago. Recently the fishing industry has surged, in part due to the retreating sea ice. On top of that, tourism has been booming too.
Nielsen says the situation resembles a gold rush. “It is like a Klondike scenario here,” he says, drawing parallels between the 4,500-person village and the Canadian region that became a byword for gold fever. “There are no unemployed in this town.”
The growth triggered by a warmer climate along with the improving accessibility of this icy land have recently put Greenland in the geopolitical spotlight, and brought attention from unwanted quarters. Last month, US President Donald Trump said he wanted to buy Greenland, which is a self-governing territory of Denmark.
His suggestion was quickly rebuffed. But the incident highlighted how Greenland is one of the few places set to benefit from climate change, even as global warming takes a catastrophic toll elsewhere.
Maybe it is going the right way for our town — but all in all, I wish it didn’t happen, because in all the earth, it is not going the right way
The largest island in the world, Greenland itself is also central to determining how quickly the impacts of climate change will be felt. Greenland is blanketed in an ice sheet about a mile deep that covers 81 per cent of its land, an area four times the size of California.
Warm air, retreating sea ice and a darkening of the ice surface caused by soot and algae are combining to heat up Greenland faster than scientists expected — and the melting of the ice sheet is accelerating.
A heatwave this summer saw record temperatures across the ice, contributing to days when 95 per cent of its surface was melting.
That could spell disaster for the rest of the world. The ice cap on Greenland contains enough water to raise sea levels by seven metres if it all melted. (This would still take thousands of years at current rates.)
Already the rapid warming in the Arctic means that Greenland is the single biggest contributor of meltwater to the rising ocean — ahead of Antarctica and mountain glaciers — accounting for about one-quarter of the rise each year.
As climate scientists race to predict the pace of ice melting and sea-level rise, Greenland is seen as holding many of the answers. “Over the next five to 10 years, Greenland is going to be the dominant player for sea-level rise,” says Marco Tedesco, head of the cryospheric processes lab at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University.
For low-lying areas such as Bangladesh, Vietnam, Florida and many small island nations, what happens in Greenland could determine their future.
The town of Ilulissat doesn’t look like a boom town at first glance. The short summer means that gravel covers most yards, gardens are impossible, and the melting permafrost has made the roads wavy and cracked. But there are also signs of wealth: cars on the streets, skimobiles ready for winter and brand-new fishing boats arriving in shipping containers at the harbour.
The town’s third supermarket opened in the spring, and cafés and tourist shops are bustling. “Business is very good,” says Paneeraq Fleischer, a manager at the Pisiffik supermarket, just next to the football field.
She has one problem though — the economic boom has led to a labour shortage. “In summer we have a problem finding people who can work,” she says. Some cafés and supermarkets have started bringing in workers from the Philippines to remedy the shortage.
Local entrepreneurs such as Flemming Bisgaard, whose company rents out construction equipment, say they are struggling to keep up with demand. “This town is exploding in terms of tourists,” says Bisgaard. With 40,000-50,000 visitors expected this year, there are some days when the tourists outnumber the residents.
Even the kindergarten has “no photo” signs, to prevent tourists taking pictures of children in the playground.
Not every area of Ilulissat life is growing, however. The number of Greenlandic sled dogs has declined steeply in recent years, largely due to the disappearing sea ice. There used to be about 15,000 in this town, many more than people, but now there are about 3,000.
“There are still fishermen, people going on dog sleds — but now it is a spare-time activity,” says Anja Reimer, the director of the local museum. Sled dogs were traditionally an essential part of ice fishing during the winter, when hunters travel long distances on sleds across the frozen ocean. But as the sea ice retreats, that way of life is in decline.
Reimer and her husband gave up their sled dogs several years ago. “People used to live off the land, but now they have to have a job,” she sighs. But she adds that Greenlanders still maintain a close relationship to nature. As one of the Inuit peoples, Greenlanders share cultural and linguistic ties with other indigenous groups across the Arctic.
She points out that each house in the town faces the ocean. “It is very important for local people to have a view of the sea — if they can’t see the sea then their spirit is depressed.”
The growing number of boats — which can now be used for more of the year because there is less ice — has contributed to a fishing boom. The price of halibut, the main catch here, has tripled in the past decade. And fishermen can catch more than they used to.
The total annual fishing catch in Ilulissat is worth some 500m DKK (£59.7m) — a lot of money for a town of 4,500. The busy harbour is flanked by a halibut-processing facility on one side and a shrimp-processing plant on the other.
“You can only fit a few hundred kilos of fish on a sled. But you can fit two tonnes on a boat,” explains Karl Sandgreen, a former fisherman. He now works in tourism, as a boat owner, and says visitors are often surprised to hear that he welcomes global warming. “I’m OK with climate change, because it is getting warmer,” he says.
In a place where winter lasts eight months a year, that does indeed have advantages. Heating bills are lower, and supply ships can access the harbour for a longer summer period to restock grocery shelves. Sandgreen says many residents welcome this. “They are not so sad about that, the climate change, they just have to make some changes to their way of life.”
The icebergs that make Ilulissat famous come from the giant Jakobshavn glacier, known as Sermeq Kujalleq in Greenlandic, which is one of the fastest-moving glaciers in the world. The glacier empties into a long fjord full of icebergs slowly making their way to the sea, the Ilulissat icefjord, which has been designated a Unesco World Heritage site.
Each year the volume of water that melts here would be enough to supply all of New York City.
The Jakobshavn glacier is one of the most studied glaciers in the world, because it flows so quickly. “When you stand there you can see the ice moving in front of your feet, it goes that fast,” says Konrad Steffen, a Swiss scientist who has been studying the ice cap near Ilulissat for more than three decades.
His research station, anchored into the ice, moves about 30cm a day as the ice flows, and speeds up to more than a metre a day in the summer. But the rapid melting has put it in jeopardy. “I could lose my station, I don’t know,” he sighs.
The world has warmed about 1C since pre-industrial times as the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased, but that warming has not been evenly distributed — and the Arctic is warming fastest of all. Steffen’s research station has recorded a 2.8C increase in average temperatures, just since 1990.
Columbia’s Tedesco sees the data from this summer as particularly worrying. “It seems like every year we are starting to see a new driver that is starting to push melting toward a new record.” Even the summit of the Greenland ice sheet, a spot that rises above freezing only every couple of hundred years, saw above-zero temperatures this summer.
The Danish Meteorological Institute estimates that the 2019 melt season resulted in a net ice loss of about 329 billion tonnes from the Greenland ice sheet, one of the highest on record.
That is not good news for the world’s rising sea level. “The changes that we see in Greenland overall are larger, and happening sooner, than what was projected,” says Eric Rignot, professor of earth system science at the University of California, Irvine.
“If you look at the rate of increase of the mass loss in Greenland and in Antarctica right now and you project that to the end of the century, we get one metre of sea-level rise.”
He hastens to add that that is a rough calculation with a lot of uncertainty — but the accelerating melt rate is clear. “When you start melting ice . . . the ice sheet will respond even faster with time, it is not going to respond linearly,” he points out.
Understanding the ice changes in Greenland is critical because it is seen as a model for the future behaviour of Antarctica — which contains 10 times as much ice but is cooler at the moment and has not started melting as much yet.
“Greenland represents what Antarctica might look like in a century,” says Rignot. “In Greenland the glaciers typically flow 10 times faster than in the Antarctic . . . you can see things happen on a shorter timescale in Greenland.”
Anna Hogg, a glaciologist at the University of Leeds, who recently returned from a research expedition near Ilulissat, says the changes observed on Greenland’s fastest-moving glacier have been particularly significant.
“Because it is so vast, so large, it is possible for this one glacier to have an impact on the overall ice loss in Greenland,” she explains. “We’ve seen on Jakobshavn various processes that we didn’t know existed — many of them were observed here for the first time.”
Sometimes those findings have been counterintuitive: Hogg discovered through satellite imagery that the giant glacier started slowing down around 2016 — and began thickening.
Greenland represents what Antarctica might look like in a century. In Greenland the glaciers flow 10 times faster … you can see things happen on a shorter timescale
“It is never just a simple picture of the ice speeds up and melts more quickly, and Jakobshavn has been showing us that,” she says. The glacier used to be moving at a rate of 17km a year back in 2013, but this summer it has been moving at about 5km a year (still fast, by glacial standards).
Even with the slowdown on Jakobshavn, the ice melt across Greenland has continued to accelerate. This year the extent of the melt was on a par with the previous record, set in 2012.
“The polar regions are these sensitive areas where a little nudge or a little change can lead to a really dramatic change,” says Hogg. “There is massive, massive change in the region, and it is impossible for it not to have significant knock-on effects.”
Some of the most alarming knock-on effects are the feedback loops that are becoming evident in the region. The retreating sea ice is one example: with less white ice cover to reflect the sun’s rays, the darker ocean absorbs more heat from the sun, warming the water, and making it harder for sea ice to form. This is why the Arctic is warming so much faster than the rest of the planet.
Scientists refer to this as “amplification”, a vicious circle where warming begets more warming. Other examples of warming feedback loops include changes in cloud cover and in the capacity of forests to absorb carbon dioxide.
Those effects are about to be spelt out in a scientific report later this month from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The ocean is currently rising about 3.3mm a year — partly due to melting ice, and partly due to thermal expansion as it warms — and has risen about 20cm during the past century.
The increase has already contributed to more damaging storms and poses an existential threat to low-lying islands, river deltas and coastal cities. While the cost of this damage is difficult to estimate, one recent study found that flooding due to higher seas would cost some $14tn (£11.2tn) annually by the end of the century.
The residents of Ilulissat have mixed feelings about all of this. “Maybe it is going the right way for our town, Ilulissat, right now,” says Bisgaard, the entrepreneur, referring to the economic growth. “But all in all, I wish it didn’t happen, because in all the earth, it is not going the right way.”
A recent survey, conducted by the University of Copenhagen and other research institutions, asked Greenlanders how they felt about climate change. Some 43 per cent said they were hopeful about it, with 38 per cent saying they were afraid of it.
As to whether climate change is good or bad overall, 40 per cent saw it as a bad thing, but 46 per cent thought it was neither good nor bad. Those figures are radically different from the views people express in Europe, where increasing public concerns about climate change have made curbing carbon dioxide emissions a top political priority.
Konrad Seblon, the manager of the Ilulissat Icefjord Unesco World Heritage site, says Greenland is less exposed than many other countries to some of the worst impacts. He points to the melting glaciers. “The day the ice is gone there, half of Europe will be under water,” he says. “When the ice is gone, we will have more land, we will have a lot of space to live — Greenland will still exist.”
In the meantime, the threat of being overrun by tourists who have come to see the melting ice has become a real concern for many townsfolk. Seblon says the surge in visitors is creating stress for both the local environment and for residents — a challenge that will be even bigger once a new airport is completed in about four years’ time.
Whether it takes 50 or 100 years, it is certain these won’t be around for ever. It looks so beautiful but really the tears of humanity will be shed over this
One of those tourists is Cui Yanhua, visiting Greenland for the first time as part of a 10-day organised tour that will also take in Iceland. While most visitors to Greenland come from Denmark and Europe, a growing number hail from China. Standing on a rocky promontory that overlooks the town, Cui pulls out his phone to take a picture of his companion alongside a polar bear statue.
“This statue is so well placed, because the polar bear is gazing out to the ice, the habitat on which it depends for survival,” he says, launching into a lengthy explanation of the polar-bear lifestyle. He is a Beijing-based artist working on a polar bear-themed sculptural installation back home, along with one about the Tibetan antelope, which is also being affected by climate change.
For Cui, the message of Ilulissat’s icebergs is clear, and he is very worried about it — perhaps more worried than some residents. “Whether it takes 50 or 100 years, it is certain these won’t be around forever,” he says, looking emotional. “It looks so beautiful but really the tears of humanity will be shed over this.” Next year he wants to go to Antarctica.
As Ilulissat gears up for more visitors, it is also trying to prepare for other, less expected changes that the warming climate may bring. Nielsen, the chief executive, says the boom times won’t last forever. “Right now, this Klondike-like situation we have, we are not going to have this situation in many years,” he says.
This summer, hotel executives and investors have been beating a path to his door, trying to cash in on the tourism boom. But he says he is more worried about how to keep kids in school, with many residents having only a primary-school education. The town’s sudden riches have also brought social problems, including drug abuse and tax evasion, he admits.
The day the ice is gone, half of Europe will be under water . . . We will have more land, a lot of space to live — Greenland will still exist
Thanks to the income from fishing, Nielsen says the town can afford to be selective about what kind of tourism and investment it accepts. He points to the bank branch down the street — the cash turnover there is the biggest of any bank branch in Denmark or Greenland, because fishermen cash in their cheques after each day’s catch.
Looking back on the changes, he is surprised that things have turned out like this.
“Fifteen years ago, we thought this was our worst nightmare, if there is no sea ice,” he recalls. “I thought, what are they going to do, the fishermen and hunters who use the ice sheet for a living? But somehow, in a very short time they adapted.”
Other Greenlanders sometimes point out that, when it comes to climate change, there’s something they have learnt from surviving here that is relevant: nature will always have the last word.
Even the seemingly peaceful icebergs make the point — they can crack apart violently without warning, sending shockwaves through the water that turn into tsunamis on shore. Reimer, the museum director, fires up her computer after our interview to show me footage of a tsunami that killed a tourist in Ilulissat.
“They are like ticking time bombs,” she says, pointing to the icebergs. “They could go off at any moment.”
For her, the changing climate, like the dangerous icebergs, demonstrates what Greenlanders have understood for a long time. “You know that nature rules here. You can’t rule nature,” she says. “The force is so strong, you can’t control it.” It is a view that holds a lesson for other places too — that we should all be getting ready for changes that no one can foresee.
Leslie Hook is the FT’s environment correspondent
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