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THESE images show the astonishing rate of break-up of an enormous glacier in north Greenland – from ice to water in just two years.

The before and after photographs, which left a Welsh scientist who led the 24-month project “speechless”, reveal the worrying effects of climate change in an area previously thought too cold to be much affected.

Dr Alun Hubbard, a reader at Aberystwyth University’s Centre for Glaciology, returned from the Petermann Glacier in north-west Greenland a month ago, but did not see the stark images documenting the changes until this week.

He said: “Although I knew what to expect in terms of ice loss from satellite imagery, I was still completely unprepared for the gob-smacking scale of the break-up, which rendered me speechless.

“It was just incredible to see. This glacier is huge, 20km across, 1,000m high.

“It’s like looking into the Grand Canyon full of ice and coming back two years later to find it’s full of water.

“It’s quite hard to get your head around the scale of the change.

“To be able to see that, everything changed in such a short period of time, I was speechless.”

Greenland shed its largest chunk of ice in nearly half a century on August 5 last year, when the momentous break-up of the Petermann Glacier set an 100 sq mile chunk of ice drifting into the North Strait between Greenland and Canada. Petermann is the largest glacier with a floating ice shelf in the northern hemisphere.

Dr Hubbard said: “This part of Greenland, which should be incredibly cold and frigid, is actually warmer than we think it is.

“These big glaciers that have in the past been pretty benign, are beginning to respond to atmospheric and ocean warming.

“There is another big glacier called Humboldt glacier which we are also monitoring; it seems to be retreating quite fast. I think this is a new part of Greenland experiencing the effects of warming.

“This part of the world should be somewhere that is safe from the effects of global warming but it’s actually responding.”

The amount of glacier melt from the past two years is more than double what was predicted, he said.

“It should be just under a metre a year melting at sea level. Over the last two years all these instruments were drilled into the surface of the ice. They had pretty much all melted out, at two-and-a-half metres of melt per year.”

Dr Hubbard began the project in 2009 alongside Jason Box, of the Byrd Polar Research Centre at Ohio State University, when they installed equipment – including six high precision GPS systems, tide gauges, a time lapse camera and a weather gauge.

He said: “We could foresee this glacier, very large in north Greenland, like it was starting to break up, that there were these big cracks and rifts in it.

“A few pieces had broken off in 2009 and it looked like something could be going on there.

“It’s really far north, it should be really frigid and cold there. You can do a lot with satellite imagery and temperature, and we saw there was something going on there. At the end of last August this very large piece did break off, it was much bigger than we ever thought.”

Supported by the US National Science Foundation and the UK Natural Environment Research Council this summer, Dr Hubbard and his team returned to Greenland to gather the data collected.

The risky five-day helicopter expedition, dubbed “Peter- mish”, departed from Qaanaaq, the northernmost non-military permanent settlement in the world. The site visit took photographs to pair with those taken during the 2009 field campaign.

Dr Hubbard said: “We were severely limited by time, fuel and were very isolated. At one point we were siphoning the last drops of fuel out of jerry cans into the EC120 to get us back to our depot.

“The whole thing was expected to take less than 30 hours but, in fact, the mission took treble this time as equipment masts had fallen and were hard to locate due to the enhanced melt since installation in 2009.

“While Tore the pilot slept to replenish his flight duty hours, I’d be out on foot searching for fallen equipment,” he added.

“We found there were actually a lot more cracks in the ice shelf, it looks like there will be another imminent detachment going on.

“What the break-up means in terms of inland ice acceleration and draw-down of the ice sheet remains to be seen, but will be revealed by the GPS data recovered, which we are now processing at Aberyst- wyth.”