Greenland: land of ice goes green as warming turns the cabbages into kings
posted by Ben
Climate change has brought new opportunities to Greenland - from agriculture to fishing to mining - that could secure its independence from Denmark and herald a return to its prosperity of over 1000 years ago. The Time’s Martin Fletcher reports on a positive tale that has widespread implications for the planet and humanity
Lasse Bjerge lives in a remote, sub-Arctic valley that is flanked by barren mountains, 20 miles by boat from the nearest town and perishing cold even on a bright September day. There, for the past two years, he has cultivated one of the world’s most improbable market gardens. As a bitter wind whistles past his red wooden cottage, Greenland’s first commercial vegetable farmer proudly lifts the synthetic sheeting protecting his crops to reveal rows of cabbages, cauliflowers and – appropriately – iceberg lettuces. This summer he even produced a few strawberries.
It is not easy, admits Mr Bjerge, 50, who began this experiment to supplement his sheep farmer’s paltry income. He was late buying his seedlings last spring because the fjord was choked with ice. There were frosts and freezing nights as late as June. His broccoli, in particular, has struggled to survive the harsh climate. Now, thanks to Mr Bjerge and two other pioneering farmers, Greenlanders can buy fresh green produce for the first time – not the tired, limp stuff flown in at exorbitant cost from Denmark. Mr Bjerge breaks up a compact cauliflower head. “Taste it,” he says. It is crisp, sweet and full of flavour, because it has taken weeks to ripen in the long, cool days of a far northern summer.
“We live on the margins of where things grow, and an extra one or two degrees can make all the difference,” says Kenneth Hoegh, Greenland’s chief agricultural adviser. Within ten years Greenland could be self-sufficient in vegetables, according to Jonstein Gard, of the Upernaviarsuk agricultural research station – whose own vegetable garden has become something of a tourist attraction. “Commercial farming is becoming more and more possible.” Greenland is on the front line of climate change. For the 57,000 inhabitants of the world’s biggest island, global warming is a present-day reality that is creating new opportunities, destroying old lifestyles and transforming landscapes – and it could well secure Greenland’s long-sought independence from Denmark.
There is probably no other place on Earth where the impact is so marked. “In London you don’t feel climate change. Here everybody is affected,” says Kim Hoegh, head of Arctic Prime, a fish processing company. “We see it with our own eyes, and feel it in our daily lives. Something is happening that’s unnatural.”
It is not all good news. Inhabitants of the tiny communities scattered around Greenland’s jagged southern rim, many of which are accessible only by boat or helicopter, say that there are many more sudden, unpredictable storms that make travel perilous. Mr Hoegh says that the fishing fleet goes out less often in winter than it used to. In one village, a cluster of brightly painted houses on a coastal island called Nanortalik, there have been at least three fatal boating accidents in two years and Greenlanders point to the mountains and lament the disappearance of the snowcaps and tongues of glacial ice that used to flow down between the peaks.
There are still many more winners than losers, however. One recent morning, a squat little fishing vessel, the Prime Judit, docked in Nanortalik after a two-day trip and unloaded 18 tonnes of cod worth about 180,000 Danish kroner (£19,000). Eydstein Sorensen, 33, the captain, was delighted. “Three years ago we’d have been lucky to get three tonnes,” he said. “The fishing is much better. For many years the fish were gone completely, but two or three years ago they started returning.” Greenland’s 50 sheep farmers should also benefit from climate change, but the past two summers have been exceptionally dry. The earlier springs and later winters should mean better grazing, healthier lambs, fatter sheep and farmers spending less on expensive winter fodder. “If there was normal rainfall it would be very good,” says Malik Frederiksen, 32, who tends 330 sheep on his remote farm 30 minutes by boat from Nanortalik. The mining industry is certainly benefitting as Greenland’s shrinking ice cap reveals its riches. Next month a British company, Angus and Ross, will reopen the Black Angel zinc mine in west Greenland because glacial retreat has exposed a mountainside that was buried beneath ice when the mine was closed in 1989. London Mining, also British, is to extract iron ore just south of the Arctic Circle from land exposed by melting ice. Gold and diamond hunters are flocking to Greenland. So many mineral and oil companies are now prospecting in and off this largely unexplored island that renting a helicopter during the summer is almost impossible. Though soaring commodity prices are the prime reason for this Klondike-style rush, less ice on land and sea clearly helps. The conditions for oil exploration and drilling in Greenlandic waters have never been so good,” said Aleqa Hammond, foreign and finance minister of its semi-autonomous Government. Ms Hammond wants to attract other new industries by using the glacial melt to generate cheap hydroelectric power. Already Alcoa, the US aluminium giant, plans to build one of the world’s biggest smelters there, creating enough jobs – 3,500 – for a tenth of Greenland’s workforce.
Global warming is thus hastening the day when Greenland no longer needs the 3.26 billion kroner a year it receives in subsidies from Denmark. At that point the island will almost certainly win the full independence that it craves. Even Greenland’s few, stunted trees have begun to thrive. In 1893 a Danish botanist planted the island’s first conifers – four Scots Pines – on a hillside near the spot where Erik the Red established the first Viking settlement in AD982. Having languished for a century they recently burst into life. “They are suddenly starting to grow,” said Kenneth Hoegh, who now hopes to plant Greenland’s first “forest” on 100 hectares (245 acres) of land.
While climate change has distinct advantages for Greenland, it is ominous for the rest of the world. The island is ten times the size of Britain, and covered in so much ice that, were it all to melt, global sea levels would rise seven metres. On a hillside above a fjord at Hvalsey, near Qaqortoq, stand the roofless stone walls of an ancient church where, 600 years ago, Thorstein Olafsson married Sigrid Bjornsdotter. Their marriage was the last documented activity of Erik the Red’s Norse community, which survived 450 years in Greenland’s harsh terrain before vanishing with the onset of the Little Ice Age in the 1400s. On a sunny autumn day the ruins look serene, but they provide a salutory reminder of how vulnerable societies are to climate change.
From the Times 20th September 08
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article4791047.ece?token=null&offset=0&page=1
See pictures of Greenland by James Glossop at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/photo_galleries/article4743552.ece
See the article ‘Greenland Melts Away at fro the Ace Age’
Greenland’s ice sheet shrank more rapidly last summer than at any other time in the past 50 years, measurements have shown. Researchers said the extent of the melt was evidence that the ice sheet was in “inexorable decline” because of global warming. Read more at
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article3193059.ece
Mee Martin Fletcher’s Greenland video at
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/greencentral