Greenland's Inuit Falling Through Thin Ice Of Climate Change

Ittoqqortoormiit, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 4th Oct, 2023) The thunder of icebergs crashing into the turquoise sea of eastern Greenland is the sound of one of the planet's most important ecosystems teetering on the edge of collapse.

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

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.

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.

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," said Erling Rasmussen of the local utility company Nukissiorfiit.

"The glaciers are smaller and smaller," he said after the warmest July ever recorded at Summit Camp atop Greenland's ice sheet.

"In the future we may have to get drinking water from the ocean," Rasmussen added.

With melting ice for water costly and unreliable, other isolated Greenland communities are already turning to desalination.