Thinning Ice Threatens Greenland’s Inuit Livelihood

AFP/APP

Denmark: Greenland’s ice sheets may hold one 12th of the world’s fresh water – enough to raise the sea level up seven metres (23 feet) if they were to melt – but climate change is already threatening the village’s supply.

As the ice melts, the hunters in the village of Ittoqqortoormiit – home to one of the last Inuit hunting communities – worry about where they will get water.

On a headland of barren tundra some 500 kilometres (310 miles) from the nearest settlement, Ittoqqortoormiit’s 350 people get their fresh water from a river fed by a glacier that is melting fast.

In a few years, it’s gone. The glaciers are smaller and smaller, after the warmest July ever recorded at Summit Camp atop Greenland’s ice sheet, said Erling Rasmussen from a local utility company Nukissiorfiit.

Cold winters, robust ice and snow are vital for both food and water for the Inuit of the Scoresby Sound, who live deeply intertwined with the natural world. But temperatures in the Arctic are rising up to four times faster than the global average.

Erling added that in the future, we may have to get drinking water from the ocean. With melting ice for water being costly and unreliable, other isolated Greenland communities are already turning to desalination, he added.