On the first of August, so much ice melted in Greenland that it could have filled 4.4 million Olympic swimming pools. A documentary filmmaker took photos to prove it.
In June, we were left stunned by the photograph showing a pack of sled dogs running through water rather than over ice in Greenland. Now from the island come further, alarming images showing actual rivers flowing across the ice sheet.
The author of the images is documentary filmmaker Caspar Haarløv, who was in the Arctic to shoot his new documentary, Into the ice. He took them on the first of August, when 11 billion tonnes of ice melted in Greenland, the equivalent of 4.4 million Olympic swimming pools. This has so far been the most severe event of the Arctic ice retreat season, which normally begins in late May but this year started at the beginning of the month. Since then, temperatures have consistently been unusually high, which has fuelled unprecedented fires across the entire region, releasing enormous quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
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In July, which according to preliminary data was the hottest ever recorded on Earth, Greenland lost 197 billion tonnes of ice when, typically, only 60–70 billion would melt. The area of ice sheet subject to melting also increased, reaching 56.5 per cent of the total extent.
Read also: Climate, Greenland is close to a point of no return
According to an international study, the island's ice is melting at a rate six times faster than it was in the 1980s, due to global warming. This is genuinely dangerous, as the Greenland ice sheet is the second largest in the world: the melting of these past few months alone has contributed to raising sea levels by half a millimetre.
This year's United Nations climate conference, Cop 25, will be held in Chile in December. But Greta Thunberg, the young Swedish activist, will set sail for South America by boat as early as mid-August. Like her, all of us — leaders included — should learn to think further ahead, because "the future belongs to those who prepare for it in the present".
