'The ice melted beneath our feet': The huskies that revealed the rapid shrinking of Greenland's ice
Steffen OlsenIn 2019, climate scientist Steffen Olsen took a startling photo of huskies appearing to walk on water. The photo quickly went viral as it revealed the reality of Greenland's rapidly melting ice.
In June 2019, a striking image of husky dogs apparently walking on water in Greenland stunned the world and quickly went viral.
The photo was taken by Steffen Olsen, a climate scientist at the Danish Meteorological Institute and lead of Blue Action, a European project which investigates the effect of a changing Arctic on weather and climate.
"The reaction surprised me," says Olsen. "It surprised me that so many people saw this as a beautiful photo. I saw it as a scary situation."
That's because the dogs were in fact wading through ankle-deep meltwater on top of sea ice in Inglefield Bredning, an 80km-long (49.7 miles) system in northwestern Greenland.
"I learned to see the photo as an illusion. People don't see sea ice, but dogs walking on water," Olsen says.
Olsen captured the photo while travelling with a team of scientists who were monitoring sea and ice conditions near the town of Qaanaaq, one of the world's most northerly towns. They were retrieving scientific instruments they had deployed during the winter.
"We had been travelling for some hours and it became clear that the melting was very extreme… [the ice] more or less melted beneath our feet while we were travelling on it," says Olsen. "The local hunters and I were very surprised… we were searching for dry spots to get the dogs and the sleds out of the water and there were none in sight. We turned around and made it back to the coast."
The dogs are typically very hesitant to get their paws wet, says Olsen. "Usually when we meet water, it's because there are cracks in the sea ice and the dogs have to jump over the water…they hate it. But it was actually very warm so I think they were happy to have cold feet," he says, adding that temperatures reached 14C (57F) on the day.
The scientists managed to retrieve their instruments a few days later once the water had drained away through small cracks in the ice sheet. "Then you have a short period of time when you can then travel again before the ice collapses and breaks up," says Olsen.
AlamyOlsen says he was extremely surprised by the rapid melting he witnessed when he took the photo on 13 June 2019. He has only experienced such an extreme event once during his 15 years carrying out research in Greenland. It's unusual for melting to occur that quickly, Olsen explains.
"It requires a sudden onset of warm air while you still have fresh snow on the ice and solid sea ice. So it's an example of an extreme event developing early in the season... The local community have told me: 'you will have to wait 100 years to see [such an event] again'."
Melting events such as the one Olsen witnessed would normally not occur until later in the season, in late June and July, but in 2019 melting started in mid-April, around six to eight weeks before the 1981-2020 average, and affected roughly 95% of Greenland's ice sheet, according to the US' National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Such early melting events can have a "snowball effect" and lead to more melting as there is less snow and ice to reflect the Sun's rays back into space and keep the surface cool, explains Bianca Perren, a paleoclimatologist at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), who studies sediment cores from polar regions to understand the long-term variability of the climate.
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Greenland experienced record ice loss in 2019, shedding a total of 532 billion tonnes from its giant ice sheet, according to a 2020 study. On average, Greenland loses 234 billion tonnes of ice per year – enough to pack into 6,324 Empire State Buildings.
"2019 was a really unusually warm year, but so was 2012," says Kelly Hogan, a marine geophysicist at BAS who studies the impacts of Greenland's melting ice sheet. In 2012, the summer period (June-August) was more than 2C (4F) warmer than the average for 1981-2010, and more than 1.5C (3F) warmer for the entire ice sheet. "Those extremes are coming round more frequently than we had thought they would. They're happening every few years," says Hogan.
"What's really distinctive about Greenland is how much melting you get on the surface in the summer, because you don't get anywhere near as much as that in Antarctica," says Hogan. "When you see huge volumes of water [on the ice], it is really shocking."
But it's rare to see "giant pools of water" on the surface like in Olsen's photo, says Perren, as usually the water seeps through cracks in the ice. "It basically pops the ice sheet up and floats it out to the coast. So often you don't have this pooling of water, but instead you have warm water that's being sent down into the bowels of the Greenland ice sheet, basically warming the whole thing," she says.
Getty ImagesThe rapid melting of the ice is already affecting local communities' way of life. "They are having to adapt the way they hunt and fish," says Olsen.
If the ice is unsafe to travel on, it also makes it more difficult for scientists to carry out their research, Olsen adds. "We will have to adapt and rely more on automatic instruments instead of community-based monitoring."
Safety is already a concern, says Perren, adding: "I have promised my son that I will not step foot on the ice sheet because it's so dangerous."
The photo has helped raise awareness of Greenland's vulnerability to climate change, says Olsen. "I have definitely found that you can get a lot of attention for the problem with a photo… so it has been very efficient.
"But I've also been challenged by people saying: 'how can you take a photo of climate change?' And I agree, you cannot take one photo and call it climate change, because that is something that unfolds over a longer time period," says Olsen. "We need to explain the photo and provide the right context."
Photos are useful tools for starting conversation about the environment and explaining scientific phenomena, says Perren. "Science has a communication problem," she says.
"When I first saw it in 2019 I remember thinking: 'oh my gosh, this is such a shocking image,'" adds Perren. "It's a symbolic image of what climate change looks like in Greenland. But there's also a scientific side to it: maybe this is unprecedented but it also [paints] a very good, kind of emblematic picture of what the future would look like."
Hogan says that photo "really drives home the extent of the problem". "It looks like the dogs are skating on something without a bottom… it feels like they could just sink at any moment, which is maybe some sort of metaphor for the ice sheet and the future."
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