Arctic melting reveals new geography in Greenland

Flying over snow-capped peaks and into a thick fog, the helicopter set down on a barren strip of rocks between two glaciers.

Flying over snow-capped peaks and into a thick fog, the helicopter set down on a barren strip of rocks between two glaciers. A dozen bags of supplies, a rifle and a can of cooking gas were tossed out onto the cold ground. Then, with engines whining, the helicopter lifted off, snow and fog swirling in the rotor wash.

When it had disappeared over the horizon, no sound remained but the howling of the Arctic wind. Dennis Schmitt, a 60-year-old explorer from California, had just landed on a newly revealed island 400 miles north of the Arctic Circle in Greenland. It was a moment of triumph: He had discovered the island on an ocean voyage in September 2005.

Now, a year later, he and a small expedition team had returned to spend a week climbing peaks, crossing treacherous glaciers and documenting animal and plant life. Despite its remote location, the island would almost certainly have been discovered, named and mapped almost a century ago when explorers like Jean-Baptiste Charcot and Philippe, Duke of Orleacute;ans, charted these coastlines. It would have been discovered had it not been bound to the coast by glacial ice. Maps of the region show a mountainous peninsula covered with glaciers. The island8217;s distinct shape, like a hand with three bony fingers pointing north, looks like the end of the peninsula.

Now, where the maps showed only ice, a band of fast-flowing seawater ran between a newly exposed shoreline and the aquamarine-blue walls of a retreating ice shelf. The water was littered with dozens of icebergs, some as large as half an acre; every hour or so, several more tonnes of ice fractured off the shelf with a thunderous crack.

All over Greenland and the Arctic, rising temperatures are not simply melting ice; they are changing the very geography of coastlines.

Nunataks 8212;8220;lonely mountains8221; in Inuit8212;that were encased in the margins of Greenland8217;s ice sheet are being freed of their age-old bonds, exposing a new chain of islands.

8220;We are already in a new era of geography,8221; said rctic explorer Will Steger. 8220;An island all of a sudden appearing out of nowhere and the ice melting around it is a real common phenomenon now.8221;

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In August, Steger discovered his own new island off the coast of the Norwegian island of Svalbard, high in the polar basin. Glaciers that had surrounded it when his ship passed through only two years earlier were gone this year, leaving only a small island.

With 27,555 miles of coastline and thousands of fjords, bays and straits, Greenland has always been hard to map. Now its geography is becoming obsolete almost as soon as new maps are created.

8211;JOHN COLLINS RUDOLF