Uunartoq Qeqertoq: the warming island
An article about the impact of climate change on Greenland.
What caught my attention in this article is not the bits about climate change, but the implications for cartographers and explorers:
All over Greenland and the Arctic, rising temperatures are not simply melting ice; they are changing the very geography of coastlines. Nunataks - “lonely mountains” in Inuit - that were encased in the margins of Greenland’s ice sheet are being freed of their age-old bonds, exposing a new chain of islands, and a new opportunity for Arctic explorers to write their names on the landscape....
Global warming has profoundly altered the nature of polar exploration, said Mr. Schmitt, who in 40 years has logged more than 100 Arctic expeditions. Routes once pioneered on a dogsled are routinely paddled in a kayak now; many features, like the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf in Greenland’s northwest, have disappeared for good.
I read Andrea Barrett's Voyage of the Narwhal this Christamas, which has me thinking a great deal about arctic exploration, and also another one of the book's themes, which is moral exploration.
What caught my attention in this article is not the bits about climate change, but the implications for cartographers and explorers:
All over Greenland and the Arctic, rising temperatures are not simply melting ice; they are changing the very geography of coastlines. Nunataks - “lonely mountains” in Inuit - that were encased in the margins of Greenland’s ice sheet are being freed of their age-old bonds, exposing a new chain of islands, and a new opportunity for Arctic explorers to write their names on the landscape....
Global warming has profoundly altered the nature of polar exploration, said Mr. Schmitt, who in 40 years has logged more than 100 Arctic expeditions. Routes once pioneered on a dogsled are routinely paddled in a kayak now; many features, like the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf in Greenland’s northwest, have disappeared for good.
I read Andrea Barrett's Voyage of the Narwhal this Christamas, which has me thinking a great deal about arctic exploration, and also another one of the book's themes, which is moral exploration.