Greenland, Land of Unending Ice
Swiss nature photographer Stefan Forster has been visiting Greenland for eight years, documenting the ice, glaciers, icebergs, and wildlife of this “magical country”. For his latest video, Greenland - The Land of Unending Ice, he visited several parts of the country to witness a glacier calving, icebergs from above, the aurora borealis, and a changing landscape.
Today quiet and untouched places are becoming more and more rare. On my first visit to Greenland, I was fascinated by the incredible power of nature that can be felt everywhere. But during the last years things have changed. The amount of icebergs is increasing savagely. Glaciers I’m visiting every year are retreating not meters but kilometers a year and the unending amount of ice seems to be endless. There is nothing more beautiful than an iceberg — everyone is unique and the light reflecting from its surface is magical. It’s sad how close beauty and decay can be seen in an iceberg.
A new study published in Nature says that Greenland’s ice sheet is melting at its fastest rate in 350 years.
“From a historical perspective, today’s melt rates are off the charts,” Sarah Das, a glaciologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and co-author of the new study, said in a statement. “We found a 50 percent increase in total ice sheet meltwater runoff versus the start of the industrial era, and a 30 percent increase since the 20th century alone.”
Forster also ran into an interesting technical problem while using his drones to capture video:
But the hardest thing of flying in Greenland is the fact, that every 2-3 minutes the difference between the magnetic north and the geographic north (which are not the same place — especially so far north) causing a fatal p-gps flight error and the drone is flying away (also the camera’s horizon).
Stay Connected