Greenland
Every day, this glacier is delivering into the ocean the equivalent of a year’s supply of fresh water for a city the size of Beijing. It is altering the chemical balance of the oceans, changing the shape of the seas, disturbing the life of the coastal waters. Eventually, when it all melts, sea levels will have risen by seven metres, drowning coastal cities across the world. Just by melting it will accelerate the earth’s warming: polar ice is like a giant planetary cooling system, reflecting eighty per cent of the sun’s energy back into space. Without this albedo effect, that energy will be absorbed, melting the tundra that stores millions of tons of methane, a far more dangerous greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
The scientists continue their catalogue of runaway change: the oceans have been absorbing increasing amounts of carbon, contributing to an acidification that is making it hard for any form of ocean life that needs to calcify, including not only corals and molluscs but also the microscopic phytoplankton that are at the bottom of the ocean food chain. Jane Lubchenco, an eminent American oceanographer, talks about the effects of the rush of fresh water into the seas and the fear that the ocean circulation might weaken or reverse, as it did in the Younger Dryas, or the ‘Big Freeze’, 11,000 years ago. Then, it took 2,000 years to return. ‘We don’t know,’ she said, ‘what triggered it or how close we might be to the tipping point.’
Her more immediate concern, though, is the dead zones that have begun to appear on certain coasts, the result, she thinks, of changes in the coastal winds that drive the currents. Instead of alternating to produce cycles of up-welling and down-welling warm and cold waters that renew the nutrients in the rich waters, the cycles have stalled, generating suffocating layers that kill all forms of life unable to swim or scuttle fast enough to the edges.
The crystalline seas around Greenland are now highly polluted by the toxins of the industrialized world: technetium from Sellafield, DDT and heavy metals from Russia, POPs (persistent organic pollutants) from flame retardants, mercury from Chinese coal burning, toxins that accumulate in the body fat of seals, the walruses, the polar bears and finally in the bodies of the people who eat them. The sense of apocalypse begins to grow.