Greenland: The Land Of Ice Embracing Climate Change | Foreign Correspondent

it's the world's biggest island and potentially its biggest problem if you were to melt the whole green and ice sheet here we are talking about around seven meters as sea level rise global warming isn't a theory here its life this is ground zero for climate change [Music] we're on a journey through an ancient land giving a glimpse of our future some fear the change and some can't wait [Music] [Music] now I seem strange in a place like this to be talking about global warming and climate change when there's still so much ice and so much snow and it's still so cold but he's the thing a rise in temperature of just one degree can literally mean the difference between ice [Music] and in Greenland the melting ice and warming water are creating winners as well as losers 10 years ago we saw how farmers were cashing in on warmer seasons today there's a surprising new boom on the top of the world 470 grams climate change take many surprising ways I guess [Music] I sing [Music] Adam Lubert loves his Island home from the glaciers and ice sheet that cover most of Greenland to the Northern Lights that appear each autumn as if by magic he Revere's his inner wood heritage and the wonder of Arctic wildlife from reindeer to musk ox but lately his inward heart has been breaking like the glaciers Alessio our Daniel Tammet colonization manual New Zealand astronaut my name samosa medical understand or to change caliber testing ototoxic Allah to interpret oil super awesome I gotta switch the Senate come on alert you may not [Music] Adam lives in Ganga sluice wok a town of 500 people just inside the Arctic Circle in World War 2 the Americans built an airbase here it slowly turned this hunting ground into Greenland's international hub most visitors just passed through here on the way to the main tourist destinations but for Adam it's the best place to see what's coming for the planet they were easily accessed from three big glacier this is very easily to see the change of the climatic change everything landscape the vegetation [Music] this is the only place you can drive to the massive ice cap that covers more than three-quarters of Greenland Adam has spent decades taking people out to see it yep more than Triano day a year going up there deep in there thousands of times yeah that's that's quite a good look at how it's changed it yeah since his childhood in the 1950s the average temperature has risen 1.5 degrees that's turning the land bone-dry it's a sandy desert alongside melting ice we can say that change the climatic change like last year we are no rain on summer if you look here to the right side you can see there lake sinking yeah and it had some bushmaster yeah this is a very unusual some hunters say difficult to find some rain here in this area because the heavy smell of the bush fire is a very strong smell I know the reindeer and the wildlife doesn't like it 25 kilometers from town is our first stop Russell Glacia one of nearly a hundred big glaciers that flow down from the ice sheets [Music] seven years ago maybe standing on here he cannot see them on sight behind us think lazy I was closer and maybe cholo between 2000 trial and fits in the glacier behind us lost 30% less so we can see how fast they change here does it make you sad when you see the changes like yeah they're aiming for me Adam hasn't just witnessed the changes with his eyes for 35 years he's been documenting them through his lens building up a rare and comprehensive record [Music] in a time of balance this carving went huge chunks fall from the glacier face should be offset by ice moving down from the sheet behind it but for decades now he's seen a system out of kilter the ice is disappearing and the land is changing [Music] now it's awesome they pushed crawling earlier and now it's barely going bigger they make things a little bit of the cheaper to one they have a big effect here in the Arctic [Music] the main change is on the ice sheet better known as the ice cap it's so vast that nobody lives in Greenland's interior in 1999 the road to Russell glacier was extended to the IceCaps edge at 38 kilometers this is Greenland's longest road this is enough Lee wrote at the end of the road yeah the walk from the carpark to the ice cap is getting ever longer [Music] this area's going down on the big guys going deeper and deeper after I think 12 year the area sunk nearly 180 meter lower the ice cap is a holdover from the last ice age elsewhere in Europe and North America giant glaciers like this melted 10,000 years ago here arctic temperatures preserved it what melted in summer was replenished by winter snow is ice on the fall it's actually on the ice it down yeah okay especially Kobe steak yeah they first not this year okay the problem now is that the ice cap is shrinking every year is different but most years it's losing more ice in the warm months than a gains in the colder months the reason that's a big problem is that the cap is so incredibly big we're standing on 8% of the entire world's fresh water from here is there not the longest part from lots of salt it's 2007 on your kilometer long ice it and then by this part is 1,500 meter white 3.5 kilo meter thick ice [Music] the only way to try to grasp at size is to see it from the air as soon as you rise of a gonna sluice walk you see giant crevices and massive rivers of meltwater the cap is so vast it will never melt entirely but it's big enough that even small changes on the surface can push up sea levels around the world and since 2004 the melt has been accelerating fast the US Space Agency NASA estimates it's been losing 30 billion tons more every year [Music] Thomas Yule Patterson is a senior scientist at the Greenland climate Research Center the ice sheet has always been melting there's always been a melting season but that melting season seemed to dramatically increase so it starts melting earlier and it they melt continues for a fill into the into the autumn every year and so and last year there there was a very high melt season fence and it started very early it is telling us that climate change is real there's no doubt about that climate change skeptics do cast out pointing out that the cap grew slightly this season thanks to record snowfall but that was caused by record hurricanes a series of super storms in the Caribbean sent record precipitation all the way to the Arctic it's the same trend you see not only green and but in many places around the world where more numerous hurricanes larger hurricanes droughts floodings all these things it's all signs of a changing climate the ice sheet is comprised of old snow so you snow or more snow and it will of course increase the mass of the icy but if that is followed by increased melting as well in following years then it will go away as well [Music] [Music] Gaius loose walks only high school the kids learn they're growing up in a very different world that doesn't mean they're worried my name is Athena and I'm third I like it very much here this a lot of nature and stuff in the summer I go rowing and kayaking or whatever and me and my friends would go out camping and stuff my dad he's a hunter so he got all these hunters going hunting and stuff what about him winter what's winter like Oh answer is pretty boring so are you worried about rising temperatures or you think it might be nice to be warmer it will be nicer to be warmer yeah I could use all that and that's the irony here the place most affected by climate change is perhaps the least concerned by it [Music] [Applause] most people welcome the extra Worf nowhere more so than in Greenland's farming hard left this is the start of a giant fraud through Kushan ik in the far south where Vikings settled a thousand years ago today thousands still live in isolated Hamlet's connected only by boat the last time I was this part of Greenland 10 years ago farmers were getting pretty excited about global warming because rising temperatures meant they could grow a lot more crops and animals so we're coming back to see how they fared and it is still part of the planet where people are benefiting from climate change [Music] which I maybe [Music] it's early autumn now and doesn't feel that warm you can have four seasons a day most of them cold I'm good you haven't changed in 10 years you were swell are your a liar our guide through the fjord will be Ken at her a former agriculture consultant who's just been named deputy foreign minister this is Greenland Sun the Sun is up there somewhere let's have a look around yeah please take care slippery [Music] a decade ago in blazing summer sunshine Kenneth took us down this same fjord to see a farming revolution rising temperatures since the mid 90s had extended the growing season by three weeks now they are willing to grow turnips and potatoes commercially and it used to be only for the farm and now they are willing to invest a lot of money in to grow them commercially on a larger scale farmers like Ferdinand egg eater were rapidly expanding their flocks and planting more fields the only downside was that summer had been unusually dry but farmer Gerda was skeptical that the warming was here to stay teaching petition me email dammit no no no see that kid knows somebody who saw Stanga she is seeking missile shop ma as firm saying in the red of massacre did at a Mesa as we retrace our trip to Ferdinand editor's farm Kenneth tells me life has become harder for Greenland's farmers they've had a lot of droughts in the months of May and June that has been become or less the the new normal I [Music] think that climate has become much more fluctuating actually more fluctuating that I would have expected 10 years ago so it's always difficult now that's the because you have to adapt all the time and if if you have to use a lot of money and on one approach and then suddenly the whole regime changes and then you have to do something else that that makes it a challenge ever easy being advanced very easy to be a farmer exactly it's you never satisfied [Music] the farm doesn't get many visitors it's iced tea in every winter and supplies are limited Ferdinand a girder can go months only seeing his two dogs two sons his wife brother and sister-in-law and their four hundred sheep [Music] yeah ten years ago he has no problem with isolation the problem these days he tells us is the weird weather this winter the snow melted early then froze instead of being a protective snow cover it becomes a killing layer of ice summers have been unusually dry with unusually light rain we have had a prolonged drought and until he became totally dry you know everything cut right and then not before we were supposed to to make the haymaking then it started to rain Ferdinand's starting to think there might just be something in this talk of climate change we certainly have the most beautiful location for a farm I've ever seen now keoki Kingsoft summer or shorter aviso pharmacy Sam's industries only law said you know eLearning tornado searching same time but also something I contested sania to purposely become disturbed [Music] do any be we head back to town fearful of being caught by ice [Music] Greenland has a long history of carving giant Berg's one of them is believed to have sunk the Titanic in 1912 but the warmer weather appears to be making this worse - I believe there is more there's more ice suddenly in some of sometimes we get enormous amounts and that just blocks the fjord we're a little bit lucky today that we went through yeah so this is actually a good day for ice oh yes this is a very good thing no problem whatsoever there's one more thing can it want to show us ahead of us in Prince William Sound is the southern tip of the ice cap well where we are right now it's probably where the the ice cap was a hundred years ago before the real retreat started they say it started around 1880 and it's all the wave actually there it's all these three kilometers way back there [Music] this is a new part of Freeman and now you're inside dreamer just look at that piece of rock standing there we under the ice sheet so this is her you see these at the edges you know small ice caves being formed how long has this been encased in ice probably at least 6,000 years probably yeah maybe longer it's happening faster than you're used to even you and your lifetime oh yes but still we have to take care it's all being held by a few columns of ice or and and the rock here the big rock and we shall have several tonnes of ice oh yes oh yes so you if something starts to crack we move out you know what the blue ice is what's that that's actually snow that has melted and then we frozen right that's what creates the blue ice uh-huh and in a few years you'll look at no longer the blue ice but actually the blue sky I sing [Music] the big melt may not have been the boon for farmers that many hoped for but one group is celebrating 90% of Greenland's export income comes from fishing out of 56,000 people some 2,000 work on small fishing boats hundreds more work for the big fleets and fish processing factories andreas Olson is a fleet manager at the state company Royal Greenland and generally we see some higher stocks tilted climate change or at least you - warmer sea temperatures but also due to the ice cap melting and when the ice cap melts a lot of nutritious water comes down the big fuel systems which creates optimal conditions for for for a fishery so with all the bad things happening from climate change you may be among the winners yeah at least it's looks like that yeah 470 grams the most remarkable change has been the appearance of mackerel a warm water fish rarely found in less than eight degrees it's mass migration so far north has left scientists stunned nobody had to really expected it but it has gone quite fast tunas yongsan studies schooling fish had the Institute of Natural Resources he's found himself in the middle of a maritime gold rush so in 2011 the first mackerel was caught in Greenland within a few years in already in 2014 there was 85 thousand tonnes landed by the fleet and that's quite a lot it corresponds to perhaps 20 to 24 percent of the national export of Greenland in that particular year that's created a whole new industry and another looks likely to follow in the last couple of years basically at the same time as a macro Haas arrives bluefin tunas also insert Greenlandic waters and they come in as a bycatch while while the trolling for macro and as you see here and as you are about about to smell very soon they are feeding on macro so this is at simatai tested macro yeah climate change take many surprising ways I guess Greenland has come to see climate change is both a problem and an opportunity each generation has had to learn to survive on scarce resources in a harsh climate and for centuries they've adapted to change [Music] Adam Lubitz ancestors moved down from the High Arctic where they lived off seals and Narwhal whales to the south where they learned to fish and farm but he finds it hard to share the joy of a warming climate on our last day in Ganga sluice walk he took me to what used to be a deep lake alongside Russell glacier it's almost empty so just over there used to be as high as the glacier yeah now it's all drained away Jack was the glacier collapsed yeah and when did this happen last year in the temple this is part of the accelerating but the climatic change mainly things like that happening so this is part of we can say former Lake Manas Lake like that and that's happening all over yeah it's writing yeah [Music] [Applause] [Music] some muscle part of a Masonic atomic missile some soft collation a lead to a cure Toto no no no not soft but some Muslim are so small miss easy mr. DeLuca's own backyard [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: ABC News In-depth

Views: 332,511

Rating: 4.5368085 out of 5

Keywords: Climate Change, Greenland, Global warming, rising sea levels, foreign correspondent, greenland travel, greenland climate change, greenland cod, greenland fishing, greenland fisheries, greenland glacier melting, greenland glacier, greenland glacier calving, greenland drone, iceberg greenland, greenland national park, greenland music, nature documentaries, environment documentary, greenland documentary, global warming documentary, climate change documentary, the land of ice

Id: AV2DvfWKyC0

Length: 29min 11sec (1751 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 29 2018