Researcher Steffen Olsen took a photograph in the frozen expanse of Greenland showing sled dogs running through water instead of on ice: it quickly went viral.
A clear sky, hills in the distance, a team of sled dogs: it looks like an idyllic image. Yet something is very wrong. There is no snow: the huskies are splashing through water.
It is the startling photograph taken in north-west Greenland by Steffen Olsen, a researcher at the Danish Meteorological Institute. On 13 June, when he went to the site with the aim of recovering equipment, the expanse of ice he had expected to find was no longer visible, covered instead by centimetres of water.
The Greenland ice sheet, which covers approximately 82 per cent of its surface, is the second largest in the world. The recession season runs from June to August, peaking in July. This year, however, too much ice has already melted: two billion tonnes on the day the photograph was taken alone. This trend appears to confirm scientists' prediction that 2019 will be a record year for ice melt on the island.
A vicious cycle is set in motion: the more the ice melts, the less heat is reflected, and the faster the rate of melting increases. This is a problem for the indigenous communities living in the Arctic, who rely on the frozen expanses for "transportation, hunting and fishing", as Olsen wrote on Twitter. But it is an issue that affects us all. Since 1972, the melting of ice in Greenland has contributed to raising sea levels by 13.7 millimetres; if the entire ice sheet were to melt, that figure would become 7.2 metres and islands such as the Maldives would be submerged.
"If we don't stop the climate catastrophe, instead of huskies it will be the inhabitants of Manhattan who find themselves ankle-deep in water," writes James Griffiths of CNN. If we don't want the Earth's photo album to look as though it belongs to another planet — where everything is turned upside down — let us start changing our daily habits while continuing at the same time to demand radical and concrete action from those who have the power to "retouch the shots".