Climate Change Tourism in Greenland
With 80 percent of the ice that covers the island melting, Greenland has become a hot travel destination
- By Joseph Stromberg
- Photographs by Alban Kakulya
- Smithsonian magazine, October 2011, Subscribe
“When you’re flying into Greenland, you almost feel like you’re going into outer space,” says Molly Schriber, a 22-year-old Houston native and Elon University graduate, who visited the island last year on a weeklong study tour. “You look at the ice sheet, and it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen before.”
More and more people are seeking that experience. Some 30,000 people reached Greenland on cruise ships in 2010— twice the number in 2004—with an estimated 30,000 more coming by air. What’s prompting many of these visits is global climate change; in 2010, according to the World Meteorological Organization, the temperature in Greenland and the Canadian Arctic was an average of 5 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. One result has been more seasonal melting of the Greenland ice sheet.
“Some people we met there were saying things like, ‘I want to visit Greenland before it completely disappears. I want to see polar bears before they are completely extinct,’ ” says Alban Kakulya, a photographer in Geneva who spent three weeks in Greenland in 2009. His photographs manage to capture the island’s otherworldly beauty as well as the incongruity of pampered, sneaker-clad cruise passengers milling around what was once regarded as a forbidding landscape.
The world’s largest island (not counting Australia), Greenland is the size of Mexico and yet has only 56,000 residents and 75 miles of roads. More than 80 percent of the landmass is covered by ice, in some places two miles thick. Most people live along the coasts in traditional villages or towns such as Nuuk (pop. 16,000), the capital and largest city. The nation is a protectorate of Denmark but has an independent government.
Greenlanders themselves seem torn about climate change. Some say melting ice will expose land for oil drilling, mineral exploration and food production. “One positive thing is that in south Greenland the climate is getting warmer, and we are looking more into how we can create our own crops,” says Malik Milfeldt, of the Greenland Tourism and Business Council.
Others worry about the effects on traditional ways of life. With less summer ice cover, hunters who use dog sleds are limited, says Hanne Nielsen, who teaches Greenlandic and Danish languages in Nuuk: “Climate change has had a really harmful influence on people’s lives, not only professional hunters and fishers, because ordinary people also fish and hunt.”
Kakulya, the photographer, and others are concerned that encouraging tourists to observe the effects of climate change, which is partly caused by carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels, only worsens the problem. “The more you want to see the effects of climate change, the more you want to travel, the more CO2 you are going to emit,” says Kakulya.
But tourism might be just the thing to get the world to take global warming seriously, says Milfeldt: “If people come to Greenland and see how much the glaciers have been retreating and realize it’s for real, and change the way they use energy, then maybe the net benefit will be for the globe, for the climate.” In that view, the real question isn’t whether people should travel, but how they should live when they get back home.
Joseph Stromberg is the magazine’s editorial intern. Geneva-based photographer Alban Kakulya calls Greenland “one of the last frontiers of the tourist industry.”
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Related topics: Tourism Greenland
Additional Sources
“Greenland,” Jason E. Box et al., Arctic Report Card 2010, October 19, 2010.
Greenland in Figures 2010 by Statistics Greenland, Government of Greenland, May 2010.
WMO Statement on the Status of the Global Climate in 2010 by the World Meteorological Organization, 2011 (PDF).
Comments (9)
Sigh, I got another thing wrong in my original comment - I remembered doing the calculations, but misremembered the results. According to Wikipedia, the Greenland icecap covers 80% of Greenland's area; melting of the icecap would raise world sea levels over 23 feet. So 80% melting would have raised world sea levels 15-20 feet. 3-5 feet (I generally discount the total) is the amount sea level is expected to rise this century if there are no changes.
Posted by Donald A. Duncan on February 12,2012 | 04:17 PM
Ah, I see where the 80% comes from - the subhead. That's wrong. The ice may be melting over 80% of the surface, but that's a different thing. Or the sea ice may have reduced 80% in the summer ("According to Canada’s Fisheries and Oceans department, as many as 80 percent of seal pups born in 2011 may have died because of a lack of sea ice."). Whatever the explanation, you should correct that subheading.
Posted by Donald A. Duncan on February 12,2012 | 04:02 PM
Greenland was named to encourage people to emigrate, not because it wasn't an icy landmass. It did, according to ice cores, have a warmer climate in the south from the 10th to the 15th century, and the settlements along the southern coast were able, at least some of the time, to raise cattle and barley.
As to Scott Duncan's comment, it's a bit puzzling. Nowhere does it say the Greenland icecap is "80% melted" - when that has happened, sea level worldwide will have risen 3-5 feet (I thought that was excessive, but I did the math and it's true). The ice is up to two miles thick - 250 feet is less than 5% of that.
Thomas Hansen's observation is naive. Svensmark hasn't "proven" any such thing. He has proposed a *theory* by which cosmic rays might account for increased cloud formation, with various effects. His methodology and assumptions are suspect, and so far experimental attempts to demonstrate the effects he propounds do not support cosmic rays as in any way sufficient to explain current data.
Posted by Donald A. Duncan on February 12,2012 | 03:55 PM
Interesting but if the ice is melting in Greenland, why is it that the recoverers of a P-38 Lightning Fighter Bomber which crashed there during World War Two had to dig through 250 feet of ice to get at it?
If Greenland was "80%" melted, then they would have found this aircraft standing in a pool of meltwater.
Once again, a massive beat-up to sell tourism - bet you can still die of frostbite while strolling through the Viking ruins - except you still have to excavate ice to get at them as well.
Grennland was named that way because at the time it was green - therefore the Vikings lived in a warmer period than today. And if you cannot explain the Medieval Warming Period, then blaming industrial CO2 today is fatuous.
Posted by Scott Duncan on November 8,2011 | 09:33 AM
WEll, my brother told me that they called that island Greenland to encourage people to live there. It is nothing to do with green plants or trees, it is just they name they chosen.
Posted by Rox on October 13,2011 | 07:35 PM
Dear Editor, Smithsonian:
I am a bit surprised that in your interesting and informative story about Greenland nothing was said about the former Norse colony in Greenland, initiated ca. 986 under the leadership of Eirik the Red. (Reference: The Viking Discovery of America, Helge & Anne Stine Ingstad, Checkmark Books, New York 2001).
The Greenland colony, dubbed the "Eastern Settlement" by the Ingstad archaeological research team, maintained contact by sea with a "Western Settlement" at L'anse Aux Meadows on the northern tip of what is now known as Newfoundland, persisting for several hundred years and eventually being abandoned because of the advent of a much cooler climate.
Sincerely,
Leonard C. Johnson
MOSCOW ID
Posted by Leonard C. Johnson on October 13,2011 | 12:34 PM
Danish scientist Henrik Svensmark has proven the climate change to be related to cosmic radiation! This does not go well with the worldwide increase in taxes regarding polution.
Reality is that we need to stop poluting, but for the right reasons..
Posted by Thomas Hansen on October 8,2011 | 02:53 AM
I really wonder why Greenland has been named so. How much warmer was the climate when that island was some place deserved a name as Greenland? This could indicate that the earth was once much warmer. While our ancesters didn't burn fossil fuel at that time, it seems like the solar activity was the main reason.
Posted by d9 on September 25,2011 | 02:10 PM