Field Notes From a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change by Elizabeth Kolbert Read Free Book Online Page A

areas where liquid water had not been seen for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years. The following winter, there was an unusually low snowfall, and in the summer of 2003, the melt was so great that, around Swiss Camp, five feet of ice were lost.
    When I arrived at the camp, the 2004 melt season was already under way. This, to Steffen, was a matter of both intense scientific interest and serious practical concern. A few days earlier, one of his graduate students, Russell Huff, and a postdoc, Nicolas Cullen, had driven out on snowmobiles to service some weather stations closer to the coast. The snow there was warming so fast that they had had to work until five in the morning, and then take a long detour back, to avoid getting caught in the quickly forming rivers. Steffen wanted to complete everything that needed to be done ahead of schedule, in case everyone had to pack up and leave early. My first day at Swiss Camp he spent fixing an antenna that had fallen over in the previous year’s melt. It was bristling with equipment, like a high-tech Christmas tree. Even on a relatively mild day on the ice sheet, which this was, it never gets more than a few degrees above freezing, and I was walking around in a huge parka, two pairs of pants plus long underwear, and two pairs of gloves. Steffen, meanwhile, was tinkering with the antenna with his bare hands. He had spent the last fourteen summers at Swiss Camp, and I asked him what he had learned during that time. He answered with another question.
    “Are we disintegrating part of the Greenland ice sheet over the longer term?” he asked. He was sorting through a tangle of wires that to me all looked the same but must have had some sort of distinguishing characteristics. “What the regional models tell us is that we will get more melt at the coast. It will continue to melt. But warmer air can hold more water vapor, and at the top of the ice sheet you’ll get more precipitation. So we’ll add more snow there. We’ll get an imbalance of having more accumulation at the top, and more melt at the bottom. The key question now is: What is the dominant one, the more melt or the increase?”
    Greenland, the world’s largest island, is nearly four times the size of France—840,000 square miles—and, except for its southern tip, lies entirely above the Arctic Circle. The first Europeans to make a stab at settling it were the Norse, under the leadership of Erik the Red, who, perhaps deliberately, gave the island its misleading name. In the year 985, he arrived with twenty-five ships and nearly seven hundred followers. (Erik had left Norway when his father was exiled for killing a man, and then was himself exiled from Iceland for killing several more.) The Norse established two settlements: the Eastern Settlement, which was actually in the south, and the Western Settlement, which was to the north. For roughly four hundred years, they managed to scrape by, hunting, raising livestock, and making occasional logging expeditions to the coast of Canada. But then something went wrong. The last written record of them is an Icelandic affidavit regarding the marriage of Thorstein Ólafsson and Sigridur Björnsdóttir, which took place in the Eastern Settlement on the “Second Sunday after the Mass of the Cross,”in the autumn of 1408.
    These days the island has just over fifty-six thousand inhabitants, most of them Inuit, and almost a quarter live in the capital, Nuuk, about four hundred miles up the western coast. Since the late 1970s, Greenland has enjoyed a measure of home rule, but the Danes, who consider the island a province, still spend more than three hundred million dollars a year to support it. The result is a thin and not entirely convincing first-world veneer. Greenland has almost no agriculture, or industry, or, for that matter, roads. Following Inuit tradition, private ownership of land is not allowed, although it is possible to buy a house, an expensive proposition in a place where