Published: March 7, 2025

By Mark Seth Lender

An outlet glacier of the Greenland icecap, Kangerlussuaq Fjord. (Photo: (c) Mark Seth Lender)

Living on Earth's Explorer-in-Residence, Mark Seth Lender, shares observations about visiting the Greenland ice sheet.

I’ve been on the Greenland icecap twice, in 2013 and again in 2015. All glaciers regardless of scale, move. Things change shape. The breaking front evolves. Patterns as well as colors are transient. It is not always easy and sometimes not possible to find exactly where you were on a prior occasion. Especially not now as climate destabilization accelerates. Two years however is not a long time. I recognized key features right away and readily found the same vantage point. The ice had not retreated, new ice having moved down to the edge. The colors, patina, patterns were different as expected. What was striking was the change in thickness. The ice had thinned by at least a meter and in places twice that. I could see the vertical erosion with the naked eye. No instrumentation was required to confirm this, not even to my previous photographs.

There was however a yardstick. Small boulders that had been sitting on the ice were now elevated, like toadstools, on stems of ice almost a meter high. The shadow of the boulders themselves had kept the ice on which they rested from melting as the surrounding material had done. It was striking and strange both in aspect and how quickly it had taken place.

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Listen to Mark's essay about the Greenland Ice Sheet