KANGERLUSSUAQ, Greenland — On the Arctic Circle, a chef is growing the kind of vegetables and herbs - potatoes, thyme, tomatoes, green peppers - more fitting for a suburban garden in a temperate zone than a land of Northern Lights, glaciers and musk oxen.

Some Inuit hunters are finding reindeer fatter than ever thanks to more grazing on this frozen tundra, and for some, there is no longer a need to trek hours to find wild herbs.

---

Welcome to climate change in Greenland, where locals say longer and warmer summers mean the country can grow the kind of crops unheard of years ago.

"Things are just growing quicker," said Kim Ernst, the Danish chef of Roklubben restaurant, nestled by a frozen lake near a former Cold War-era U.S. military base.

"Every year we try new things," said Ernst, who even managed to grow a handful of strawberries that he served to some surprised Scandinavian royals. "I first came here in 1999 and no-one would have dreamed of doing this. But now the summer days seem warmer, and longer."

It was minus 20 degrees Centigrade in March but the sun was out and the air was still, with an almost spring feel. Ernst showed his greenhouse and an outdoor winter garden which in a few months may sprout again.

Hundreds of miles south, some farmers now produce hay, and sheep farms have increased in size. Some supermarkets in the capital Nuuk sell locally grown vegetables during the summer.

Major commercial crop production is still in its infancy. But it is a sign of changes here that Greenland's government set up a commission this year to study how a changing climate may help farmers increase agricultural production and replace expensive imported foods.

Change is already under way. Potatoes grown commercially in southern Greenland reached over 100 tons in 2012, double that of 2008. Vegetable production in the region may double this year compared with 2012, according to government data.

Some politicians hope global warming will allow this country a quarter the size of the United States to reduce its dependency on former colonial master Denmark for much of its food as political parties push for full independence.

Greenland, which is self-governing aside from defense and security, depends on an annual grant from Denmark of around $600 million, or half the island's annual budget. But the thawing of its enormous ice sheets have seen a boost in mining and oil exploration, as well as an interest in agriculture.

"I expect a lot of development in farming sheep and agriculture due to global warming," said Prime Minister Kuupik Kleist, whose government set up the commission. "It may become an important supplement to our economy."

Locals love recounting how Erik the Red first arrived in the southern fjords here in the 10th century and labeled this ice-covered island "Greenland" to entice others to settle. There is evidence that the climate was warmer then, allowing Viking settlements to grow crops for five centuries before mysteriously dying out.

From cows to crops
The scale of this new agriculture is tiny. There are just a few dozen sheep farms in southern Greenland, where most of the impact of climate change can be seen. Cows may number less than a hundred. But with 57,000 mostly Inuit human inhabitants, the numbers to feed are also small.

"You need to put this into perspective. We used to be high Arctic and now we are more sub Arctic," Kenneth Hoegh, an agronomist and former senior government adviser. "But we are still Arctic."

The symbolism is enormous, however, highlighting a changing global climate that has seen temperatures in the Arctic increase by about twice the global average - about 0.8 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times.

"There are now huge areas in southern Greenland where you can grow things," said Josephine Nymand, a scientist at the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources in Nuuk. "Potatoes have most benefited. Also, cabbage has been very successful."

Sten Erik Langstrup Pedersen, who runs an organic farm in a fjord near Nuuk, first grew potatoes in 1976. Now he can plant crops two weeks earlier in May and harvest three weeks later in October compared with more than a decade ago.

He grows 23 kinds of vegetables, compared with 15 a decade ago, including beans, peas, herbs and strawberries. He says he has sold some strawberries to top restaurants in Copenhagen.

But Pedersen is skeptical about how much it will catch on.

"Greenlanders are impatient. They see a seal and they immediately just want to hunt it. They can never wait for vegetables to grow."

There is still potential. Hoegh estimates Greenland could provide half its food needs from home-grown produce which would be competitive with more expensive Danish imports.

But global change is not all about benefits. While summers are warmer, there is less rain. Some experts say that Greenland could soon need irrigation works - ironic for a country of ice and lakes.

"We have had dry summers for the last few years." said Aqqalooraq Frederiksen, a senior agricultural consultant in south Greenland, who said a late spring last year hurt potato crops.

On the Arctic circle, a flash flood last summer from suspected glacier melt water - which some locals here blamed on warm weather - swept away the only bridge connecting Ernst's restaurant to the airport. It came right in the middle of the tourist season, and the restaurant lost thousands of dollars.

It was an ominous reminder that global warming will bring its problems. Still, for Pedersen and his fjord in Nuuk, the future looks good.

"The hotter, the better," Pedersen said. "For me."

Copyright 2013 Thomson Reuters. Click for restrictions.

What had been a blurry picture about polar ice — especially how it impacts sea levels — just got a whole lot clearer as experts on Thursday published a peer-reviewed study they say puts to rest the debate over whether the poles added to, or subtracted from, sea level rise over the last two decades.

"This improved certainty allows us to say definitively that both Antarctica and Greenland have been losing ice," lead author Andrew Shepherd of the University of Leeds in Britain, told reporters. Not only that, but the pace has tripled from the 1990s, the data indicate.

Combining satellite data from dozens of earlier studies, the study "shows that the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets have contributed just over 11 millimeters (0.4 inches) to global sea levels since 1992," he added. Two-thirds was from Greenland, a third from Antarctica.

---

That's 20 percent of all sea level rise over the last two decades, with the rest mostly from thermal expansion of waters due to warming sea temperatures, the authors noted. In recent years, however, the percentage "has gone up significantly" to nearly 40 percent, added co-author Michiel van den Broeke from Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

Published in the journal Science, the study was based on input from 47 experts at the 26 institutes that produced earlier studies with wild variations. Some of those studies estimated melt was raising sea levels by up to 2 millimeters a year, Shepherd noted, while a few said that overall polar ice was growing, and thus countering sea level rise.

Much of the discrepancy was due to data showing that Antarctica's vast eastern ice sheet was adding, not losing ice.

Eastern Antarctica has indeed added ice, but continent-wide the last decade shows a "50 percent increase in ice loss rate," said study co-author Erik Ivins, a satellite data expert with NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab. 

Most of that loss is in western Antarctica — at places like Pine Island Glacier, where an iceberg the size of New York City is set to calve off. The iceberg itself won't raise sea levels since that ice is already atop water, but thinning glaciers mean that ice on the mainland can make its way downhill to the sea faster.

Even more dramatic, Ivins said, is that Greenland "is losing mass at about five times the rate today as it was in the early 1990s."

Greenland's melt rate has gone from 55 billion tons a year in the 1990s to nearly 290 billion tons a year recently, according to the study. 

A top ice expert who was not a study co-author told NBC News that the new data mark "an important step forward" in better estimating future sea level rise.

"While we had a basic picture of what was going on, it was an incomplete and blurry one," said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado-Boulder. "We needed to step back and take a fresh look, making the best use of all of the different data sources that we have.

"With this study," he added, "we now have a lot confidence in how the ice sheets are behaving."

The findings come as nations negotiate in Qatar over a new climate treaty to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which aimed to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases tied to a warming Earth. 

And while a 0.4 inch rise in sea levels over 20 years doesn't sound like much, many experts fear further warming will accelerate the polar melt. The ice sheets would raise sea levels by more than 200 feet if they completely melted over centuries — not likely, but even a tenth of that would have catastrophic impacts on coastal areas.

The authors warned that while the new data should become the benchmark for future forecasts, any new studies could be compromised if aging satellites are not replaced. In the U.S., the Obama administration is overhauling its satellite program after an outside review team found it "dysfunctional."

Related: Sea levels rose 60 percent faster than forecast, study finds

"It’s really critical that these measurements are sustained and several satellites are beginning to fail," noted Ian Joughin, a University of Washington researcher.

"If we really want to have meaningful information that you know planners can use to build seawalls," he added, "there’s going to have to be a big push to improve our projections of sea level rise using models."

More world stories from NBC News:

• Tobacco industry uses trade pacts to try to snuff out anti-smoking laws
• Syrians risk lives in battle to protect nation's ancient sites
• An ocean away in UK, time is running out to claim $100 million lottery prize
• ANALYSIS: Egypt learns the art of politics amid protests
• Arafat's exhumation: Palestinians' desire for truth might be dashed again
• Chinese paper falls for Onion 'sexiest man alive' spoof
• ANALYSIS: Israeli defense chief quits politics — but for how long?
• Scientists rush to save manta rays, the 'pandas of the ocean'

Follow World News from NBCNews.com on Twitter and Facebook

 

 

Just a week after scientists reported with alarm that 97 percent of Greenland had seen ice melting on the surface in mid-July, new data shows that after a brief refreeze much of the massive ice sheet has again seen melt.

Temperatures again warmed above freezing at key points between July 24-31, according to data provided to NBC News by Konrad Steffen, director of the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research.

Thomas Mote, a climatologist at the University of Georgia at Athens, added that satellite imagery showed that the week peaked on Saturday with 74 percent of the giant ice sheet seeing melt. 

---

Typically, about a quarter of the ice sheet has melt on any given day in July, he noted.

"This event was almost as impressive as earlier this month, but didn't have quite as much melt in the north and northwest," Mote told NBC News.

"The big issue is simply the total amount of melt going on this summer, as opposed to any one day," he said. "Overall, we've had much earlier-than-normal and more extensive melting on Greenland this summer."

Like the mid-July melt, this one coincided with an "impressive ridge" of warm air sitting over Greenland, Mote noted.

Related story: 97 percent of Greenland sees ice melt

Mote said he's anxious to see satellite data at the end of summer showing any change to Greenland's total ice mass. "I would expect a very large loss of mass from the ice sheet this summer," he said.

Greenland ice cores do reveal that such thaws have happened every 150 years or so, but the fear now is that it might occur much more frequently due to warming sea and air temperatures. 

"If we continue to observe melting events like this in upcoming years, it will be worrisome," NASA glaciologist Lora Koenig said last week when the first data were released.

More world stories from NBC News:

• Fugitive anti-whaling activist says ex-crewman betrayed him
• Military drafted in to fill empty seats at London Olympics
• Romney would 'respect' Israel strike on Iran, aide says
• Rome's leaning Colosseum has experts worried
• 2 US climbers found dead on Peruvian peak
• Olympic crasher marched at Opening Ceremony
• Elephants slaughtered, orphan found in latest Africa poaching

News on NBCNews.com on Twitter and Facebook

 

 

Three satellites found that 97 percent of Greenland -- the land mass second only to Antarctica for its volume of ice -- underwent a thaw never before seen in 33 years of satellite tracking, NASA reported Tuesday.

Satellite experts at first didn't trust their readings, especially since they showed an incredible acceleration. Over four days, Greenland's ice sheet -- which covers 683,000 square miles -- went from 40 percent in thaw to nearly entirely in thaw.

"This was so extraordinary that at first I questioned the result: Was this real or was it due to a data error?" Son Nghiem of NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, Calif., said in NASA's statement about the findings.

---

Scientists on the ground in Greenland had been reporting an unusually warm summer thaw, including damage at a snow airfield and strong runoff threatening a bridge, Tom Wagner, who manages NASA's ice research programs, told NBC News.

Ice cores from Greenland's highest region do reveal that such island-wide thaws have happened every 150 years or so, at least over the last few thousand years, but the fear now is that it might occur much more frequently due to warming sea and air temperatures.

"We can't lose sight of the fact that Greenland's ice sheet is losing 150 gigatons of ice a year," Wagner said. That translates into raising sea levels by one-one hundredth of an inch. Additionally, the danger of greater warming and greater melt persists. 

"If we continue to observe melting events like this in upcoming years, it will be worrisome," said Lora Koenig, a NASA glaciologist who helped analyze the satellite data.

Monitoring stations on land "showed temperatures above freezing, confirming that the surface was melting for the entire ice sheet," Konrad Steffen, director of the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research, told NBC News.

Since then, he added, "temperatures have fallen below freezing for the higher elevations but still are melting below 1500 meters."

The director of the top ice research center in the U.S. said the discovery fits into "the larger picture of a strongly warming Arctic."

"Arctic sea ice extent this summer is so far tracking at very low, near record levels, and the ice cover is unusually diffuse," Mark Serreze of the National Snow and Ice Data Center told NBC News.

On top of that, he said, the seasonal melt that followed the 2012 winter "started unusually early over most of the Arctic Ocean."

The center's latest report, issued Tuesday, noted that" Arctic sea ice continued to track at levels far below average through the middle of July, with open water in the Kara and Barents seas reaching as far north as typically seen during September."

Thomas Mote, a University of Georgia climatologist who looked at the satellite data, said the melt followed an unusual series of warm air ridges over Greenland since late May, with the strongest coinciding with the rapid thaw in mid-July.

Each successive ridge, Mote told NBC News, was "stronger than the previous one" and it looks like the pattern has finally broken down. 

The ridges happened just as a cyclical weather phase known as the North Atlantic Oscillation shifted. "Together, they produced near perfect conditions for this event," Mote added.

Related: Huge Greenland iceberg breaks off glacier

Because they hold so much ice on land, Greenland and Antarctica have the potential to raise sea levels significantly if warming continues or worsens. 

Sea levels have already risen by about 8 inches in the last century, partly due to some ice melt but also thermal expansion caused by warming seas.

The U.N. climate panel estimates sea level could rise between 7 inches and nearly two feet this century -- the latter a scenario that could prove catastrophic for many coastal areas around the globe.

NASA said researchers had not yet determined whether this summer's Greenland thaw would be significant enough to raise sea levels.

Greenland has enough ice to raise sea levels by 23 feet if it all melted off.

A recent study found that it could take a long-term increase in global temperatures of just 2-3 degrees Fahrenheit to completely melt Greenland's ice sheet in 2,000 years. 

More world stories from NBC News:

• Going for gold: British workers cash in on Olympics with strike threats
• Afghan police commander leads defection to Taliban
• Norway to London: One family's Olympic odyssey
• Reports: Workers told to underplay Fukushima radiation
• US F-16 fighter jet crashes off coast of Japan
• Gunman in Afghan police uniform kills 3, wounds several
• Explosion, fire shuts down Turkey-Iraq oil pipeline; PKK blamed
• Assad reportedly directs troops from tribal heartland as rebels flood capital

Follow World News on NBCNews.com on Twitter and Facebook

 

 

 

 

WASHINGTON -- Some of Greenland's glaciers are moving about 30 percent faster than they did 10 years ago, contributing to rising global sea levels, but that still may not be enough to reach the most extreme projections for 2100, scientists reported on Thursday.

Researchers have been monitoring the big ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica for decades as one indication of the impact of human-spurred climate change.

Made of compacted snow, these glaciers can move toward the sea, and when they get there, they dump water into the oceans around them. The faster they move, the more water they add, and the higher the oceans get.

---

Not all glaciers move at the same pace, according to Twila Moon and her co-authors at the University of Washington and Ohio State University, whose research is published in the current issue of the journal Science.

Inland glaciers with no outlet to the sea poke along at top speeds of 30 to 325 feet a year, the researchers found, while those that end at the ocean can travel 7 miles a year.

The glaciers that flow to the sea around Greenland are the ones to watch, Moon said in a telephone interview, because that is where four-fifths of the loss of ice in Greenland occurs.

Satellite surveys of more than 200 glaciers showed that these comparatively fast-movers in the east, southeast and northwest areas of Greenland increased their speed by an average of 30 percent from 2000 to 2011.

The researchers found that the glaciers heading for the water were not accelerating as much as had been speculated in earlier projections of the worst that could happen. Based on those projections, there was a previous forecast of sea level rise of about 6 feet by century's end.

That would be enough to inundate parts of the U.S. Gulf coast, Alaska, Italy, France, England, Scotland, Denmark, Brazil, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, China, Japan, the Korean peninsula, Southeast Asia and Australia, according to maps of sea level rise at the Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets. 

The latest research indicates this is unlikely by 2100.

"Two meters is really kind of a worst case," Moon said. "Now we have the luxury of a little bit more time and being able to actually look at the observations from the last 10 years. At this point it doesn't look like there's any evidence for the worst-case scenario."

A low projection of 8 inches is within reach, the researchers found, and even a small rise in sea level can add to the risks of storm surges and floods. As Moon put it, "If you raise the floor of a basketball court, you're going to have a lot more slam-dunks."

Because multiple factors contribute to sea level rise, it is difficult to determine the exact impact of Greenland's melting glaciers. Global seas have been rising by a bit more than 1 inch a year.

Just knowing how much ice is going into the ocean around Greenland does not give the complete picture, according to a related article in Science. Projections of regional sea level rise are complicated, but they are needed, said co-author Joshua Willis of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

"What people really need to know is, how is sea level going to change in my backyard?" Willis said in a telephone interview. To figure that out, he said, scientists must not only figure out the glacier melt situation on a global scale but also add factors like wind, geology, water temperature and even gravity that can have powerful impacts in specific areas.

In southern Louisiana, for example, the land is sinking as the seas are rising, creating a potential double-whammy there. In Greenland, by contrast, the land may actually rise as the weight of heavy ice slides off, like a couch cushion rebounding after a person gets up after a long sit.

Copyright 2013 Thomson Reuters. Click for restrictions.

A network of GPS stations across southern Greenland has detected that the area lost 100 billion tons of ice due to an unusually warm summer in 2010, researchers report. What's more, removing that much weight has raised parts of the bedrock by a quarter inch more than in recent years.

Greenland's ice sheet has been seeing a steady melt during the summer months, and those GPS stations in years prior to 2010 typically detected an uplift of 0.59 inches.

"But a temperature spike in 2010 lifted the bedrock a detectably higher amount over a short five-month period -- as high as 20 mm (0.79 inches) in some locations," Ohio State University said in explaining the research by Michael Bevis, one of its geologists, and others that are part of the POLENET research network.

---

Bevis described the findings last Friday at a conference of the American Geophysical Union, saying he's convinced that the uplift is due to the ice loss.

"Really, there is no other explanation. The uplift anomaly correlates with maps of the 2010 melting day anomaly. In locations where there were many extra days of melting in 2010, the uplift anomaly is highest."

He added that the findings also have implications for sea levels.

"Pulses of extra melting and uplift imply that we'll experience pulses of extra sea level rise. The process is not really a steady process," he said.

Experts had earlier estimated that Greenland between 1961 and 2003 saw years that ranged from 25 billion tons of new ice to years where 60 billion tons were lost. Years since then have seen even higher shrinkage.

100 billion tons of ice melting from Greenland's ice sheet translates into a global sea level increase of about .01 inches.

The team first reported that ice sheets, which can be thousands of feet thick, suppress bedrock in 2008, when they discussed findings from similar GPS sensors on Antarctica.