On top of the world, by a fjord in western Greenland, a remote hydro power plant is buzzing with extra water from the melt of ancient glaciers. This island at ground zero of global warming is seeking to be one of the few places on Earth to benefit.
Outside the Buksefjord plant, the biggest of five hydro-electricity stations built in Greenland since 1993 in a push to move away from imported oil, cod that usually only thrive further south can be seen swimming in the clear water.
And a worker at the facility is preparing to grow potatoes and turnips on land close to the Arctic Circle that is usually too cold for anything other than lichen and reindeer.
The north Atlantic island “is in the midst of new thinking,” Environment Minister Mala Hoy Kuko said, to capitalize on an alarming thaw that included a record early melt on the vast ice sheet in April 2016 before a cooler May.
Hydro power “potential will grow even bigger with the warming of the climate,” Kuko said in the capital Nuuk, which gets power from Buksefjord 56 km (35 miles) away. Above his desk is a 2-meter tusk of a narwhal, a whale known as the unicorn of the sea.
Climate change, caused mainly by greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels, is set to cause economic harm in almost all parts of the world by spurring ever more droughts, heat waves and floods, according a U.N. panel.
Low-lying tropical island states from the Maldives to Tuvalu view Greenland’s 3,000-meter (10,000 ft) thick ice sheet with foreboding since it contains enough ice to raise world sea levels by 6 meters if it ever all melted, over many centuries.
But for the 56,000 inhabitants of Greenland, a giant island a quarter the size of the United States, the melt may be unlocking frozen assets and helping businesses including fishing, farming, mining, shipping and tourism.
“Unfortunately I can’t sit down and weep and say it (climate change) is bad because overall it’s good for Greenland,” said Henrik Leth, chairman of both Greenland’s biggest private company, Polar Seafood, and the Greenland Business Association.
His firm’s pre-tax profit rose to 335 million Danish crowns ($51 million) in 2015 from 235 million in 2014 thanks to high prices for its main products, prawns and Greenland halibut.
About 90 percent of the island’s exports are fisheries, and many hunters and fishermen welcome shifts in currents, apparently linked to warming, that have brought cod to west Greenland for the first time in two decades, and mackerel to the east.
HUNTERS
Prime Minister Kim Kielsen, whose island has wide powers of self-rule within the kingdom of Denmark, cautioned that “there are pros and cons” to the melt.
Arctic regions are warming at about twice the global average, partly because a melt of white ice and snow reveals darker ground and water that soaks up ever more heat.
Most worryingly for Greenlanders, the melt threatens the livelihoods of indigenous hunters in the north who use dogsleds and rely on ice to hunt seals. And some buildings and airports standing on permafrost are at risk.
Faced with such threats, the islanders are looking to extract as many benefits as possible from the changes.
The ice melt could help the government meet its target of raising the share of its electricity that comes from hydro to 90 percent by 2030, from about two-thirds now.
Officials say hydro plants that could draw directly from the ice sheet could power a proposed new aluminum smelter and iron ore mines such as for iron ore.
Buksefjord gets water from a lake, fed mostly by rain and melting snow, with some from ancient glaciers, officials say.
Climate change could also boost the island’s hopes to develop minerals ranging from rare earths to oil and gas, even though low prices have put most plans on hold. Melting snow and ice makes prospecting less complicated and improves access to sites.
“There will be more open water for shipping and it will be cheaper for companies to get out minerals,” said Josephine Nymand, a scientist at the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources.
The opening waterways could prove a boon for the tourism industry too, giving visitors better views of spectacular glaciers, such as at Ilulissat. This summer, Crystal Cruises LLC plans to send a first cruise ship through the Northwest Passage from Alaska to New York, calling at Greenland.
Among other projects linked to the Greenland melt, scientists are also studying how to tap some of a billion tonnes of milky colored sediment that gets washed every year from the ice sheet into the sea.
“It could be dredged up and shipped to tropical nations as nutrients” for farming, said Minik Rosing, a professor of geology at Copenhagen University.
Source: REUTERS
