Greenland
The landscape of Greenland is almost impossible to see. The sheer scale of the place is only visible from the air. It is a geologist’s paradise of rocks and glaciers, the land barely inhabited. The mountains are too forbidding, the roads all but non-existent. Greenland’s 57,000 people live on its fringes, looking to the sea. It was the frozen sea that was the human highway, the route by which the polar peoples migrated tens of thousands of miles, on which they lived and hunted with ingenious self-sufficiency.
The ice gave them their winter freedom, their food and the ability to roam. It was the intimacy and the beauty of the ice, the dog sleds, the fishing, the animals that lived on and under it, that lay at the heart of Inuit culture. It was the ice that defined the place and its people and gave the long winter, dark for months on end, its power and attraction. ‘Summer is boring,’ a Greenlander told the American writer Gretel Ehrlich, who travelled there in the 1990s. ‘It’s in the winter that we are happy.’ Ilulissat’s dogs have been chained up all summer, waiting for the winter, for the freedom of the ice and a rich diet of walrus and seal. But last year, the ice didn’t come to Ilulissat. Nor did it come the year before.
The Arctic has lost about a third of its ice since satellite measurements began thirty years ago, and the rate of loss has accelerated sharply since 2002. In August 2007, the North-West Passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans was reported to be free of sea ice for the first time in recorded history, and at the present rate of melting, the summertime Arctic could be entirely ice-free by 2030. In the polar north of Greenland, the last of the Inuit hunters struggle to live as they always have, eating walrus, seals and polar bears, hunting across the increasingly dangerous ice on dog sleds.
On the southern tip of the island is sub-arctic Greenland, where Eric the Red landed in 987. He gave the place the name by which we know it and established a Viking colony that lasted nearly five hundred years. Eric had no way of foreseeing that the period during which he landed on the green shores of the fjord would later be called the medieval warming, or that four hundred years later it would end. When the climate began to cool, the sheep farming failed as the growing season for grass shrank away. Sometime around 1450, the last survivor died, the cold settling inexorably on the settlement and no more relief ships arriving. Did he — or she — still scan the fjord, hoping for the sight of a sail or a long ship? Did he sit by the tiny churchyard and worry that there was no one left to bury him?
As the Norsemen sickened, far to the north a fresh wave of Eskimo migrants was thriving. They had arrived at much the same time as Eric, but with their specialized technologies — their kayaks and harpoons, their dog sleds constructed from the bones and skins of the animals they hunted, their clothes that allowed them to survive Arctic temperatures, their ice houses and highly adapted diets — they were to flourish for the best part of the next thousand years. Eric’s colony could have survived too had they moved north and learned how to live as the Inuit. Now the climate is changing again and the Inuit polar hunters are in trouble. Animal migration patterns have changed. The sea ice comes late, and in some places not at all. It is thin and unreliable and dangerous. Men, dogs and sleds fall through. Two years ago, for the first time ever, the government had to fly dog food to the north of Greenland: five hundred hunters had managed to feed themselves, but their dogs were starving. In Eric’s old colony the sheep are back and farmers are thinking of trying cattle.