The locals are feeling the warming in their bones - Haaretz

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Tue., September 04, 2007 Elul 21, 5767

Israel Time: 02:19 (EST+7)

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The locals are feeling the warming in their bones

By Assaf Uni

KANGERLUSSUAQ, Greenland - If the sea surface rises and floods the Netherlands, scientists say the water will probably come from Greenland's ice dome.

This is why Janekke Ettema, a scientist from Utrecht University in The Netherlands, came all the way to Kangerlussuaq. She's here to study the dome.

"After two years behind a desk, building models of the changing sea surface following the dome's melting, it feels different to be out in the field, seeing and feeling the dome," she said.

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From afar, the ice dome looks like a frozen wave. It envelops brown hills and black cliffs in white and rises some 100 meters above the sandy soil. A stormy river of melted ice water flows at its feet. Every now and then, a piece of the wall at the edge of the dome breaks off and falls into the river with a deafening crack.

A few years ago, four Swedish hikers were killed here when a piece of the glacier wall broke away and crushed them.

We are near a glacier in Kangerlussuaq, in western Greenland. Over the weekend, an entire lake at the foot of the ice dome - three kilometers in diameter and 100 meters deep - flowed west into the sea and disappeared in a few hours, after a glacier serving as a dam collapsed. This kind of thing happens once in decades. It was a miracle no one was killed, a local man said.

This confirms what scientists have understood in recent years; that Greenland's icecap is responding to climate change and being altered faster than previously thought.

Vilades Petersen, 73, who lives in a residential home for seniors in the little town of Ilulissat.

"We were seven brothers and sisters. We had no electricity and smeared seal fat on a stone and lit it for light. The smell didn't offend us; today it might," Petersen said. "It was much colder in winter then. We had a coal oven, but we didn't always have coal to burn in it. The girls used to play with a whale fin, dressing it up in sealskin clothes like a doll."

When Petersen was 16 he began to hunt, with a spear.

"When I was 18, I received my first kayak and went hunting with it. I caught a lot of seals and birds. My family was happy. As a hunter, you learn to follow the regular routes of the seals and birds."

When Petersen was young, the sea started freezing in late August and the water level was much lower.

"When I was a boy the tiny island off Ilulissat was much bigger," Petersen said. "You could have put a whole flock of seals on it. The weather has changed completely. Once it was fixed. Now it keeps changing. I can feel it in my bones."

The Inuits are world champions in adjusting to change, says Dr. Kirsten Strandgaard, director of the small history museum in Ilulissat.

"They have to be. For thousands of years they were hunters, their lives revolved around fish, fowl, seals and whales and they migrated according to their hunting prospects," Strandgaard said. "In the summer, they lived in sealskin tents near beaches where they could hunt and fish. In the winter, they built earth houses from which they fished through the ice and hunted seals."

On Sunday night, we went to see the Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights. Mathijas, a Danish guide, and Sara, a producer from London who has been trying to rescue a Discovery Channel television crew stuck on the ice dome, joined us at a lake outside the town. Green lights criss-crossed the clear sky above us. They grew stronger, whirled into balls and giant curtains covering the sky, appearing to flutter in the wind. We stood transfixed for almost two hours.

The Inuits used to believe the Northern Lights were the spirits of the dead playing in the sky. I can see why.

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