Greenland ice sheet
Interesting facts
- On 22 December 1991 a weather station near the summit recorded −69.6 °C, the coldest temperature ever measured in the Northern Hemisphere, though nobody noticed until 2020.
- In August 2021 rain fell for 13 hours at Summit Station, more than 3,200 metres up, where rain had never been recorded and there were no gauges to measure it.
- Radar surveys in 2018 revealed a 31-km crater hidden under the ice near Hiawatha Glacier, thought to have been made by an iron asteroid some 58 million years ago.
- Ice cores drilled here preserve lead pollution from metal smelting in ancient Greece and the Roman Empire.
- The oldest ice found in Greenland is about a million years old, and soil beneath the summit has stayed buried under ice for roughly 2.7 million years.
- Greenland has carried large glaciers for at least 18 million years, but a single sheet first covered most of the island only about 2.6 million years ago.
- In July 2012 the surface was melting across 97 percent of the ice sheet; ice cores show the last melt on that scale happened in 1889.
- Its largest outlet glacier, Sermeq Kujalleq (Jakobshavn Isbræ), drains about 6.5 percent of the whole sheet and in 2012 flowed at around 45 metres a day.
- Dark mats of algae growing on the ice absorb more sunlight and were found in 2020 to increase annual melting by 10 to 13 percent.
- Beneath the ice in the northwest lies Camp Century, an abandoned Cold War US military base dug into the sheet as part of Project Iceworm.
Why it is worth it
Numbers struggle to do this thing justice. It covers about 80 percent of the world's largest island, stretches roughly 2,220 km from north to south, and holds an average of 1,500 meters of ice on top of the bedrock — in places, over 3 kilometers of it stacked up. Melt every bit of it and global sea level rises by something like 7.4 meters; together with Antarctica, it locks up more than two-thirds of all the fresh water on Earth.
It isn't a scaled-down copy of Antarctica, either. Greenland's ice sheet sits far enough south — between roughly 60° and 80° N — that it isn't actually inside the polar zone the way its southern counterpart is, and it lacks Antarctica's vast floating ice shelves. Instead the ice squeezes out through narrow fjords as outlet glaciers and "ice tongues," rivers of ice pushing directly into the sea rather than spreading out over it, which is part of why Greenland's edges look so different from Antarctica's from the air.
The sheet has been losing mass every year for close to three decades now — 1996 was the last time it grew rather than shrank overall — and the rate has climbed since: recent seasons have logged over a hundred billion tonnes of net ice loss in a single year. That number is abstract until you remember it's a direct line to how fast coastlines everywhere else are going to change.
Getting there
1445 km from Nuuk. Kulusuk Airport (KUS) is about 1249 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Greenland ice sheet is an ice sheet which forms the second-largest body of ice in the world. It is an average of 1,673 m (5,489 ft) thick and over 3,488 m (11,444 ft) thick at its maximum. It is almost 2,900 kilometres (1,800 mi) long in a north–south direction, with a maximum width of 1,100 kilometres (680 mi) at a latitude of 77°N, near its northern edge. The ice sheet covers 1,710,000 square kilometres (660,000 sq mi), around 80% of the surface of Greenland, or about 12% of the area of the Antarctic ice sheet. The term 'Greenland ice sheet' is often shortened to GIS or GrIS in scientific literature.
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