Greenland Melting: The End of the End of the World

Colgan, the joker of the group, has smeared his face with zinc, leaving thick white streaks that make him look like an improperly rinsed clown. A first-year Ph.D. candidate from Toronto, he cheerily complains, "It's funny how you study so hard to be a glaciologist and then you come here and end up doing the work of a rural Chinese laborer. Yesterday I was hauling buckets of snow over a hill."

Konrad Steffen, a professor of geography at the University of Colorado, stands at the edge of the pit, smoking a cigarette, his legs spread and planted like two-thirds of a tripod. Steffen has traveled to Greenland every spring since 1990. A large portion of his fieldwork involves maintaining the 22 weather towers he's set up at various points on the ice sheet. The towers, which look like antennae jutting out of the snow, continuously record climate data.

Steffen was born in Zurich, and he speaks in a thick Swiss-German accent. He's tall and gangly, with skin that's been leathered by years of polar curing and the sort of wild beard favored by homeless men, sea captains and extras on Deadwood. With his long, thin face, the public figure Steffen most brings to mind is John Kerry, if Kerry were an 18th-century fur trapper.

Growing up near the Alps, Steffen always loved skiing and mountaineering. He originally came to Greenland to measure, in the most basic sense, ways in which the climate interacts with ice. The research was always interesting (to him, at least), but not the sort that carried major geopolitical, future-of-humanity implications. "I did not come to Greenland because I thought there was warming or a fast melt," he says.

But since the mid-Nineties, Steffen has recorded a steady, increasingly distressing upswing in temperature. "Before last year, 2005 was the biggest melt year," Steffen says. "And before that, 2002 was the biggest in the past 30 years. So we break a record every two or three years now." Nodding at the pit, he says, "Towers fall over from the melt. Usually we could know how deep to dig so they would stand, but that has all changed."

The students angle their shovels under the long central shaft and try to keep from damaging the assorted devices — solar panels, ball-shaped radiometers, a spinning propeller to measure wind velocity, a snow sensor that resembles a steel thermos — attached to the protruding metal arms. More than archaeologists now, the students seem like characters in a science-fiction movie who have just stumbled across something disturbing: an artifact from some advanced civilization that is not their own, one that didn't make it.

Historically, Greenland has never been a terrific draw for outsiders. The vast central region of the country is uninhabitable ice. In winter, it can be dark for months on end. Even today, there are no roads connecting the major population centers, so flying remains the most practical way to get around the country. Ilulissat, the gorgeous coastal town that's become Greenland's primary tourist destination, has more sled dogs than humans.

Despite all of this, in the past few years Greenland has attracted more visitors and international attention than ever — thanks almost solely to global warming. Because the effects of warming can be seen most intensely in the Arctic, where temperatures have been rising twice as fast as in the rest of the world, Greenland has become synonymous with climate change. This, naturally, has drawn an increasing number of researchers attempting to study and (hopefully) slow or halt the disintegration of the ice sheet, along with reporters looking for dramatic ways to illustrate complicated, science-heavy stories, politicians on photogenic fact-finding missions (Nancy Pelosi and a congressional delegation visited Steffen's camp in spring '07) and ecotourists hoping to catch one last glimpse of an endangered species (in this case, the metaphorical species being an entire country on the verge of melting).