Greenland Melting: The End of the End of the World

Humans being humans, the change has also drawn people looking to make a buck — in particular, oil and mineral prospectors. No one is exactly sure what lies beneath the 81 percent of Greenland that is covered in ice. But the melt is making it exponentially easier to find out. In 2004, when the U.K. mining company Crew Gold Corp. opened the Nalunaq gold mine, it was Greenland's first new mine in more than 30 years; by last year, 78 mineral-exploration licenses had been granted to about 30 companies. According to the London newspaper The Independent, the entire flying capacity of Air Greenland was booked by prospectors for much of last summer. Aside from oil and gold, they've come looking for diamonds, zinc, lead, silver, zirconium and other squares on the periodic table (niobium, molybdenum) you've never heard of. "The last five years," an Air Greenland pilot tells me, "it's become a modern Klondike."

It's rare that a disaster happens with enough advance warning to allow for observation in real time. We think of natural disasters as sudden, brutal things; entering a "disaster zone" usually implies after-the-fact, a surveying of the wreckage. It's not often you can walk around inside a disaster as it's occurring, talk to the future survivors (and casualties, and profiteers), make sure the light is perfect for capturing the collapse. Greenland, as ground zero of the climate crisis, is one of those disasters, and that is why so many divergent interests are converging here right now. Who doesn't want to see the future?

Although it is the largest island in the world, roughly the size of all 26 states east of the Mississippi, Greenland has a minuscule population — only about 56,000 people. Historically, visitors have made the difficult trek for a number of reasons. The present-day Inuit population, originally hunters from Central Asia, most likely arrived about 5,000 years ago. Vikings showed up around 985, led by Erik the Red, who supposedly christened the country "the Green Land" in order to trick other Nordic settlers into joining him. (This may be the first recorded instance of a real-estate naming scam.) In the 17th century, European whalers began prowling the coast, ultimately decimating the bowhead-whale and walrus populations. The Danish colonized Greenland in the 18th century and imposed restrictive trade agreements; Greenland remains part of the United Kingdom of Denmark, though the country moved to a semiautonomous home-rule agreement in 1979. The United States set up several military bases in Greenland during the World War II era, including the still-operational Thule Air Base. During the Cold War, an American B-52 bomber flying over Thule crashed off the coast; documents made public eight years ago revealed that one of the hydrogen bombs the plane was carrying has never been recovered. (The U.S. government has not acknowledged that this might have something to do with the cleanup crew's high cancer rates.) And, of course, explorers like Robert Peary came to test their mettle against the harsh climate and win the race to the North Pole. In 1897, Peary also brought six Inuits back to New York, where they were housed in the basement of the Museum of Natural History. Four quickly died; a seven-year-old boy named Minik survived, only to learn that the museum buried an empty casket at his father's "funeral" and kept the body for its collection. In 1909, when Peary finally claimed to have reached the Pole, the San Francisco Examiner interviewed Minik, then 19. The headline was "Why Arctic Explorer Peary's Neglected Eskimo Boy Wants to Shoot Him."

Today, Ilulissat is the third-largest town in Greenland, with a population of about 4,500. As I fly into western Greenland on a tiny Dash 7 propeller plane, the terrain below is gray-brown tundra, lightly streaked with snow, a ratio that reverses as we approach Ilulissat. We pass frozen lakes of various sizes. The edges have begun to melt, so the lakes look as if a child has poorly attempted to trace their outline with a thick marker. It is an incredibly clear afternoon, and the shadow of the airplane floats over the blasted-looking terrain below like an evil black bird.

To counter the monotony of the landscape, Greenlanders paint their buildings garish colors. Ilulissat, from the air, looks like a toy town on a hill. The houses are barn red, sunflower yellow, Dodger blue.

Ilulissat overlooks Disko Bay, which is fed by the Jakobshavn Isbræ, the fastest-moving glacier in the world. Greenland's central ice sheet is always moving, resulting in "outlet glaciers" like Jakobshavn, which disgorges massive icebergs through the fjord and into Disko Bay, where they make their way to the ocean. (The iceberg that sank the Titanic likely took this path.) The view of the bay from Ilulissat, which means "the icebergs," is one of the most spectacular sights in the world. Some of the icebergs are the size of islands; others look like gleaming pottery shards. Though "fast-moving glacier" sounds like an oxymoron, the postcard view of the bay you admire before closing your curtains at night (which still looks like day, so you have to close your curtains very tight) will be completely different from the postcard view greeting you in the morning.