Greenland's New Islands and Global Warming

Greenland's coastline used to show many mountainous peninsulas covered with ice. They are called nunataks, meaning "lonely mountains", in Inuit. Today they are disappearing, and in their place are islands surrounded by a rising sea.

"We are already in a new era of geography," said Will Steger, a seasoned Arctic explorer. "This phenomenon - of an island all of a sudden appearing out of nowhere and the ice melting around it - is common now." In August 2006, Steger discovered a new island in the polar basin that had been surrounded by glaciers when he traveled the same route in the summer of 2004.

It's a new era of exploration as well. Notable features of the landscape, like the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf, have completely disappeared. Explorers and researchers paddle kayaks along routes that were pioneered on dogsleds.

Hans Jepsen, a cartographer at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, remakes maps to reflect these changes. In the summer of 2006, he recorded several islands in eastern Greenland, 400 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Earlier aerial photographs show peninsulas there. That fall, one island was explored and documented by Schmitt, a 60-year-old explorer who has participated in over 100 Arctic expeditions in the last 40 years. He had discovered the island independently in September 2005.

The speed at which Greenland's glaciers are melting has taken everyone by surprise. Until recently, glaciologists believed that ice sheets would react very slowly to rising global temperatures. "We're seeing things that people have thought are impossible," said Martin Truffer, a glacier scientist at the University of Alaska. A study in the June 2006 issue of The Journal of Climate noted that Greenland is the single largest contributor to global sea-level rise.