When A Country Melts

We live in a time of great change. Cities are growing at unprecedented rates, while mass communication brings the world closer together than ever before. But one has to go far from civilization to find the once place on Earth that perhaps best represents this paradigm: Greenland.

Greenland, the ironically named ice-covered island located in the high Arctic, contains entombed in its massive ice sheet thousands of years of climate history, chronically abrupt and inexplicable shifts in world temperatures. Through to the modern day, another such shift is happening, although its cause — the greenhouse effect — is well known. Interestingly, these rising temperatures and the massive melt-back they are causing may actually be a boon for Greenland and is the driving force between its nascent independence movement.

Following the end of direct rule by Denmark, Greenland's mainly Inuit population is gaining a new confidence, looking for a better deal for itself, as opposed to that offered by its colonial masters. Hedging their bets on new land and new mining opportunities revealed by the retreating ice, the island is rapidly modernizing for a warmer world. But Greenland's new towns sit just kilometers from the ruins of Norse settlements that failed to survive a changing climate centuries ago.

Elizabeth Kolbert's reporting for The New Yorker takes the reader across the island's melting ice, following the story of the scientists investigating the effects of climate change on Greenland, as well as the locals trying their best to respond to their rapidly changing world. Throughout this, she weaves a compelling and disturbing narrative: Greenland stands as both metaphor for the world at large and also as a forewarning of what is to come for human civilization.