Ammassalik Island



A great place to begin a trip around the Arctic and discover more about its uncertain future is on top of this mountain above the town of Tasiilaq on Ammassalik Island. The view seems to stretch to infinity: behind me are the ice-sharpened high peaks and glaciers of eastern Greenland, to the west lies the great ice cap and the route taken by Fridtjof Nansen in 1888, on his way to become the first person to cross the ice all the way to western Greenland.



(Image: John McConnico)

Kong Frederik IX Land, Greenland



Once on the ice cap, I found it was not quite how Nansen first saw it. As the climate warms and that warming is amplified in the Arctic, the ice is melting away.



Here a stream of meltwater is vanishing down a small "moulin" – a vertical shaft down into the ice. You can hear the churning, mill-race noise of the water from far away and that helps to track them down, but they are dangerous places: one slip and you'll never emerge from the ice cap's underwater plumbing.



The meltwater that vanishes under the ice is helping lubricate its slow slide towards the sea and speed up its disappearance.



(Image: Alun Anderson)

Ilulissat



The result is easy to see in western Greenland. Thanks to meltwater, and to the even bigger effect of warm seawater getting underneath the protruding snouts of glaciers, the Greenland ice is rushing towards the sea as never before, calving monster icebergs.



Of the 10 huge ice streams that drain the enormous mass of Greenland's ice cap, the 3-kilometre-wide Jakobshavn glacier is the greatest. In 1992, the glacier was logged moving at a steady 5.6 kilometres a year. In 2000, it suddenly accelerated to 9.5 kilometres, and by 2003, it was roaring along at 12.5 kilometres.



Here you can see the result, with massive icebergs reaching the sea near the small town of Ilulissat.



(Image: Alun Anderson) Advertisement

Sermilik fjord, Greenland



The speed-up in Greenland's glaciers wasn't factored into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 report and its estimates of sea-level rise because not enough was known about it. Now some studies estimate that Greenland's melting may be adding 1 millimetre a year to world sea level, two-thirds of that coming from fast-moving glaciers.



A millimetre doesn't seem much, but keep going for a century, add melt from other glaciers, Antarctica and the natural expansion of the sea as it warms, and a 1-metre sea-level rise by 2100 looks easily possible.



That would threaten coastal cities and low-lying nations – and the great Greenland melt can keep going for another 1000 years or more before its 5 kilometre-thick ice has gone.



(Image: Alun Anderson)

Kong Karl Land



The sea ice is melting too, and the polar bear is its most famous victim. At the end of summer 1993, Arctic sea ice covered 7.5 million square kilometres; after a catastrophic collapse in September 2007, only 4.3 million square kilometres remained. Since then, the area of summer ice has recovered slightly, but the ice still seems to be thinning, setting it up for another catastrophic collapse.



This self-confident female polar bear, which came across the pack ice to "hunt" the ship in which I was travelling in eastern Svalbard, is protected from hunting but not safe from climate change. A 2007 US Geological Survey study suggests the bears in this region will be gone by 2050.



(Image: Alun Anderson)

Moffen Island, north Svalbard



Walrus will also suffer as the ice melts. With fearsome tusks, a walrus doesn't necessarily pay much attention to passing humans, preferring to lie comfortably on the ice like a giant slug. Singing and dancing often gets their attention, and they will swim over, sometimes coming so close you can smell their notoriously bad breath (from eating too many clams).



On the Arctic's Pacific side, where most walrus live, ice is vital because it carries mother and newborn pups on a safe platform across food-rich seas. Now that ice is vanishing, the pups are dying from drowning, starvation and from trampling by adult walrus as they try to make an unnatural home on land.



(Image: Alun Anderson)

Alkefjellet, Spitzbergen



These Brünnich's guillemot (thick-billed murre) are still safe from predators on the cliff-ledge nest sites they have used for thousands of years. But the ice that used to be near is now melting ever further back into the central Arctic. This is a worry because the ice-edge zone provides the best foraging ground: fresh water pours from the melting ice, floats on top of the nearby salty seawater and traps plankton close to the light where it can bloom.



The green band of productive sea can easily be spotted by satellite along the ice edge, but it is moving out of reach of nesting birds. In some areas, it is hitting breeding success.



(Image: Alun Anderson)

Starnes fjord, Ellesmere Island



It is not just the Arctic's animals that face change but also its people. The terrain looks inhospitable, with ice caps spilling glaciers over the bare ground, but Inuit hunters live even here, on Ellesmere Island.



Inuit were moved to this remote area in 1953 in a controversial resettlement programme, later described by a government inquiry as the worst human rights violation in Canada's history. Even so, they adapted, and found seal, whale and musk ox to hunt. Their survival is one of Inuit's proudest stories and a continuing inspiration in their quest for self-government.



(Image: Alun Anderson)

Resolute Bay, Cornwallis Island



The descendants of those resettled Inuit live in Canada's most northerly settlements of Grise Fiord (population 165) and Resolute (population 230). Here I had my first experience of a hunting community and of seeing bits of animals left scattered around the village in what is, after all, a giant freezer.



A couple of days earlier, I had had the magical experience of watching white beluga whales playing in shallow water alongside my inflatable Zodiac boat. It was a shock for a southerner used to going to the supermarket to encounter them again on the beach with the tastiest part of the meat already stripped from their bodies.



(Image: Alun Anderson)