Startling picture shows research team traversing melted sea ice in Greenland

A research team was forced to traverse through melted sea ice as they retrieved their oceanographic moorings and weather station equipment in Greenland.

Sled dogs were photographed wading through water on top of a melting ice sheet in the Inglefield Bredning Fjord in the country’s north-west.

The photo was taken on June 13 by Steffen Olsen of the Danish Meteorology Institute's Centre for Ocean and Ice, who said the water was flowing on top of a 1.2m thick ice sheet, according to the Guardian.

His colleague, Rasmus Tonboe tweeted the picture, saying: “Rapid melt and sea ice with low permeability and few cracks leaves the melt water on top.”

Mr Olsen also tweeted about how communities in Greenland rely on the sea ice for their way of life.

He said: “Communities in #Greenland reply on the sea ice for transport, hunting and fishing.

“Extreme events, here flooding of the ice by abrupt onset of surface melt call for an increased predictive capacity in the Arctic.”

Ruth Mottram, climate scientist at the Danish Meteorological Institute, told the newspaper: “This year the expedition to retrieve the instruments – by dog-sled, still the most practical way to get around in this region at this time of year – ran into a lot of standing water on the sea ice.

“The ice here forms pretty reliably every winter and is very thick, which means that there are relatively few fractures for meltwater to drain through.

“Last week saw the onset of very warm conditions in Greenland and in fact much of the rest of the Arctic, driven by warmer air moving up from the south.”

The DMI weather station at Qaanaaq airport nearby reportedly measured temperatures of 17.3C last Wednesday and 15C last Thursday, which is high for northern Greenland in summer.

Ms Mottram explained that melting such as that pictured would not usually happen until late June or July, adding that it was too soon to say what role global warming had played.

She said it is “still a weather-driven extreme event, so it’s hard to pin it down to climate change alone”.

But she added: “Our climate model simulations expect there to be a general decline in the length of the sea ice season around Greenland, [but] how fast and how much is very much dependent on how much global temperature rises.”

Forecasts indicated that the warm conditions over Greenland would persist at least for another few days, she continued, so dog-sled teams may have to wade through more melted sea ice yet.