Reflections from Greenland’s Disappearing Ice

I just returned from Greenland with CGEP Advisory Board Co-Vice Chair Tracy Wolstencroft and wanted to share a few reflections about the trip.?

It’s hard not to fall under the spell of both Greenland’s breathtaking majesty and also its frightening fragility. We arrived at Ilulissat (which means “icebergs” in Greenlandic), Greenland’s third largest town, which lies just north of the Arctic Circle. It is one of the few places in Greenland where glaciers from the ice sheet reach the sea, so it is both a beautiful and visually powerful testament the effects of more rapid warming.?

What is most striking about arriving in Greenland is the scale. As the flight approaches, you can observe the Greenland ice sheet—about three times the size of Texas and two miles thick at its deepest point. There are only two ice sheets on the planet—the other is in Antarctica, roughly eight times larger than Greenland’s. Together, they contain more 70 percent of the world’s fresh water.?

Looking out the window of our hotel overlooking the Ilulissat Icefjord or walking around town, I was struck by the tension we grapple with every day at the Center on Global Energy Policy, between today’s energy reality and the urgency of accelerating the clean energy transition.

The largest thing we could see out the hotel window was not the floating chunks of ice that had broken off the ice sheet in the distance, but rather the oil storage tank (below, left side of photo) that supplies fuel for Ilulissat’s cars, boats, and heat. (The electricity was previously oil-powered but is now supplied by hydropower from glacial meltwater—a disturbing benefit of the more rapid warming Greenland is experiencing.)?

Despite 80 percent of Greenland’s electricity coming from renewables (mostly hydropower), renewables account for only 12 percent of total energy consumption. Some remote settlements we visited – such as Rodebay, below – rely on oil for all their electricity, fuel, and heat.

In the town of Ilulissat, fuel is subsidized by the government because, according to fishermen we spoke to, cheap petrol is vital to their economic well-being.?

Even for a town at ground zero of climate change’s impacts, the hard reality is that its economy and the well-being of its people still depends heavily on fossil fuels?(about 80 percent for Greenland as a whole).?

As I’ve often written, two things can both be true at the same time: we can break record after record for clean energy deployment and cost declines (driven by the urgency of curbing emissions we are being reminded of every day with record heat baking the planet), and yet fossil fuel use and emissions can continue to rise. The only thing more unforgiving than the reality of what’s required to meet the world’s growing energy needs is the brutal math of the carbon budget. The world has already warmed around 1.3 degrees Celsius, and in the Arctic the pace of warming is up to four times faster.?

To give a sense of scale, the Greenland ice sheet contains enough water that if it were all to melt, sea levels would rise around 23 feet. If both Greenland and Antarctica melted, sea level would rise more than 200 feet.?

At the current rate of warming, the IPCC projects that sea levels could rise 1 to 3 feet by 2100. But there is a high degree of uncertainty, with the potential for much larger increases from major, nonlinear effects, such as the collapse of major parts of the ice sheet, positive feedback loops from ice loss, or releases of methane from the permafrost. A distinguished team of scientists estimated in 2019 that Greenland was melting six times faster than it had in the 1990s.

While we’ve all read these scientific projections and numbers, seeing first-hand the scale and speed of climate change’s impacts at the point where melting ice was falling from calving glaciers the sea was both dramatic and frightening.?

The photo below we took (left) shows the Greenland ice sheet from the air. The cliff-like ridge line running across the ice is the Jakobshavn Glacier. And the lighter color, flatter ice on the left side of the photo, is the Jakobshavns Icefjord. The Greenland ice sheet is gradually melting, causing rivers of ice to flow off the land into the water. The center photo gives a sense of the scale of the icefjord flowing away from the glacier. The Jakobshavns Glacier is one of the fastest in the world, moving at 46 meters per day (20 years ago, it moved at half that rate).?

You can also get some sense of perspective on the size of the floating pieces of ice in the Icefjord from the photos of Tracy and me below.?Twenty years ago, the Eqip Glacier below would have extended across the entire photo below.?

The visit highlighted for both of us the importance of the work we do at the Center on Global Energy Policy every day to find pragmatic and effective solutions to address today’s biggest climate and energy challenges through research, education and dialogue. It is not enough to grasp the urgency of combatting climate change and accelerating the pace of decarbonization. Turning that sense of urgency into action requires deep expertise and practical experience in policy design, technological innovation, and capital markets, paired with a global approach that is sensitive to the perspectives and needs of developing economies. (The visit also highlighted the importance of work on adaptation and resilience, which many of our colleagues across Columbia University are focused on.)

One example of CGEP’s pragmatic approach is our Carbontech Development Initiative , which is working to advance technology and policy to support solutions like Direct Air Capture. Tracy and I also had a chance to visit one of the pioneering projects in carbon removal at this Orca facility in Iceland, where Climeworks and CarbFix are injecting and mineralizing CO2?in the basalts under Iceland. The photo below shows two collector units stacked on top of each other, which together remove 1,000 metric tons per year (the whole plant has 8 units, so does 4000 tons). And construction is underway to build 72 more units down the road.?

Iceland is an excellent spot for carbon removal because its basalt bedrock is capable of storing CO2, but it is also a hotspot for very low-cost renewable energy. Across the road from Climeworks is one of the largest single-site geothermal plants in the world, which we also visited (right). The plant produces steam to drive turbines for electricity. In addition, it provides hot water for district heating in Reykjavík. The small amount of CO2?and H2S the plant produces is captured and stored (right).?

What we saw and learned in Greenland reaffirms the hard work and dedication our scholars and staff exhibit every day at CGEP. Looking ahead to the rest of the year, stay tuned for more exciting research, events, and news, as we celebrate our 10th?anniversary .?