Vanishing Glaciers and the Polar Ecosystems Struggling to Adapt

Field report

Once thought to be permanent fixtures of the polar landscape, the massive ice sheets have a troubling reality.

In a time when everything in the Arctic appears to be changing faster than anyone predicted, coming across a landscape that looks the same as it did a decade ago is not something you expect to find. In 2021, however, much to the dismay of a polar ecology team from the University of Copenhagen, the unexpected suddenly became clear along the coast of Greenland.

Measuring a scant 100 by 200 feet and rising about nine feet above sea level, the remaining ice shelf was layered in dark sediment and dust and gravel. It was initially believed to be a stable feature, part of a glacier tongue documented in 1978.

But when I posted photos of the retreating ice and its coordinates on social media," expedition leader Morten Rasch, of the university's department of glaciology and polar ecology, said in a statement, "a number of veteran Arctic researchers went crazy and said that it couldn't be true — that the ice was retreating this fast.

The stable ice feature, it turned out, was actually some 2,500 feet further inland than it had been just decades before. Instead, the team suddenly realized they had discovered a landscape newly exposed by the retreating ice sheet. They proposed calling the phenomenon "Qeqertaq Avannarleq," which is Greenlandic for "the newly exposed land."

It's a bit like the elders in the past, who remembered a certain landscape but now find a totally different one," Christiane Leister, Swiss philanthropist and creator of the Leister Foundation that financed the expedition, told the UK Guardian.

A Melting Reality

While the initial discovery of newly exposed terrain was celebrated after the 2021 expedition, a follow-up visit in the summer of 2022 came to a much more sobering conclusion. After performing detailed measurements and thermal scans, the expedition determined that the exposed landscape was actually the result of massive glacial retreat, with the ice sheet losing a layer of thickness equivalent to the height of a ten-story building in just a few years.

"Several of these 'newly stable landscapes' have been observed throughout the ages, which then later disappeared again as the ice retreated further," expedition member René Forsberg, professor of glaciology and polar ecosystems at the Technical University of Denmark, said in a release. "Our new studies show unequivocally that all these reported 'stable ice features' are actually temporary exposures. This applies to both the newly documented 'Qeqertaq Avannarleq' and the first observed ice shelf collapse, which was recorded in 1978. The remaining ice is typically 20-30 meters [66 to 98 feet] thick, with a thin surface layer of soil and pebbles — far too little to support the polar ecosystems that once thrived there."

For now, Kaffeklubben Island (known by the more delightful name of Coffee Cup Island) remains one of the last refuges for the tiny flowers and hardy insects that somehow persist at the northernmost point of land on Earth.

The current understanding for the exposed gravel deposits like those near the retreating ice is that they are remnants left behind by glaciers (known as moraine deposits) that have been pushed to the surface by ice movement. The expedition leaders believe these newly visible features, which can be re-covered by advancing ice or washed away by storms, were likely created by nearby "floating glacier tongues" about 25 to 30 miles west of Cape Morris Jesup, at the northernmost extremity of Greenland — the same glaciers that polar bears and Arctic foxes depend on for hunting grounds.

The retreating ice features, however, with their thin layers of mud and pebbles supporting fragile moss and lichen communities, are still a bit of a mystery. "They can be categorized as semi-stable habitats, which may well support hardy organisms for up to several years before the ice retreats further," Forsberg added.

One benefit of understanding this retreat phenomenon is, according to the expedition, better predictions about which Arctic ecosystems will survive and which will vanish.

"The fact that these are temporary ice features and not stable landforms will solve some of the confusion about which Arctic ecosystems can actually be protected, and also the geopolitical question of how much habitable territory actually remains," said Morten Rasch. "Now we can map the changing landscape and be sure that conservation plans account for what the ice will reveal — and what it will take away — in the years to come."