Greenland

Arctic ICCE Project
Inuit Climate Change Enthnographies

Inuit Nation

Greenland is a country with many distinctions. It's the largest island on earth. It has the largest glacier in the northern hemisphere. Since 70 percent of Greenlanders smoke, they have the fastest growing rate of lung cancer in the world. It's home to almost mythical animals, like the single-horned narwhale, albino-like beluga whales and bedraggled musk ox. It has one of the best telecom systems on earth. And it is also the first and only country on earth run by an indigenous people.

Well, almost. Even though Greenland’s Home Rule Government is run by Greenlanders, the nation is still a territory of Denmark. Denmark pays heavily for the privilege of maintaining this remnant of its old empire, providing 3.5 billion Danish Kroner in subsidies and support to the Greenlandic economy in 2007. That financial assistance has been necessary to this point because there are only 58,000 people in the country, clinging to the coastal fringes of the island since the center of the land mass is covered with ice. Other than fishing, there is little industry in Greenland, where providing education and medical care to people scattered in tiny villages is extraordinarily expensive.

GREENLAND
Kalaallit nunaat

Crown of the World

If you look in the upper left hand corner of this map, you'll see where I have recorded stories for the past seven years. It's called the Thule region, encompassing the town of Qaanaaq (in red), Savissivik (in black) and several other villages too small to show up on this map. The most important of these towns — for my purposes — are Siorapaluk, the most northerly, constantly inhabited village on earth and Qaanaaq, a community of about 700 people where almost every household hunts.

The Thule region and the remote southeast coast of Greenland are among the only regions left where most residents still live live

almost-completely from subsistence hunting and fishing. The hunters travel by dog sled in winter in search of seals, narwhale, belugas and walrus. In the spring they hunt polar bear. In the summer there are birds to be had and the men continue to hunt seal in the open water from boats and occasionally still from kayaks. Year round they also catch small halibut and other fish in the fjords near their villages. In the rest of Greenland, from Illulissat to the Narsaq at the southern tip of the island, residents mix hunting and fishing with paying day jobs. But outside the Thule region in the northwest and the Tunu region in southeast Greenland, the cash economy has become more important than subsistence hunting.

Taking the Heat

As much as any people on earth, Greenlanders are attuned to and dependant on the land beneath their feet. And they've begun to feel that land change. More and more land is being exposed as the ice sheet and glaciers recede. In fact, mining experts are finding molybdenum, zinc and uranium within the newly exposed rock. In August of 2010, a U.K. Energy company announced that it had found oil in the waters off Greenland.

The ice is disappearing not only on land, but at sea. Elders say they first noticed a decline in shorefast sea ice around the year 2000. That decline is accelerating. At one of Greenland’s most famous glaciers, just outside of Illulisaat, the rate at which it slides seaward has increased 300 percent in the past decade. To learn more about glacial melt of the Sermeq glacier, its acceleration and consequences to the ice sheet and Greenland’s culture, click here.

The Project

Amid all the debate over climate change, one thing is incontrovertible. The Arctic is melting.

Fast.

According to the international Panel on Climate Change, warming is occurring at the poles ten times faster than it is in temperature regions.