ILULISSAT, Greenland - As in every summer for the past 20 years, Konrad Steffen spent this past one high atop Greenland's ice sheet. In 1990, the University of Colorado at Boulder professor, one of the world's greatest experts on climate change, established a project known as Swiss Camp, where research is conducted into the changing nature of the Greenland ice sheet. And changing it certainly is, for the worse.

"The situation is deteriorating from year to year," Steffen says during an interview at the airport of this small town, some 250 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle. "We set up the camp in 1990 at an altitude where there should not have been any melting. But this summer alone, the camp lost an entire meter in altitude as a result of melting ice. If you double that by the area of the entire ice cap, you get an awful lot of water. "We never had anything like this," adds Steffen, who is tall and thin, with an overgrown blond beard.

"We lost equipment that disappeared in the water, we discovered huge slits that formed beneath the ice. In fact, the ice cap is losing so much ice that the camp itself has begun to come apart. Next year I think I'll have to rebuild it."