Greenland’s melting has been adopted by the world as its own problem. But for the islanders grieving their dissolving world, the crisis is personal, and dangerous.
By Dan MacDougall, The Guardian
A thin blanket of fog curls over the block before it disappears back out to sea. Exhale. Inhale. The freezing breaths of a dormant leviathan – slumbering somewhere out in the depths.
It’s 1am and judging by the flickering glow of televisions in the windows of the bleak two-storey rows facing us, it’s clear that few of the local residents are asleep. Shielded only by flimsy blinds it’s impossible to escape the midnight sun in the northern Greenlandic town of Ilulissat. The light here, some 180 miles north of the Arctic Circle, seeks out every man-made chink and weakness; the cracks and folds of window frames, even the keyholes of doors.
Only an hour ago a gang of local children, called in by impatient mothers, finally stopped bouncing on a communal trampoline. At each jump, in the heart of the world’s most remarkably situated public housing complex, they would have glimpsed one of the most incredible views imaginable. Only a large industrial chimney distorts an otherwise unhindered view of Greenland’s Ilulissat ice fjord, the frozen womb that calves 35bn tonnes of icebergs every year and sends them floating silently past, the size of city blocks, towards the northern Atlantic and a meltwater demise.
Constructed for coal miners in the late 1970s, the social housing units known locally as “the white blocks” are, in fact, a broad pallette of colours from blue to green and red. Seal blood and outboard engine oil stains the concrete stairwells. Graffiti – some of it scrawled in anger – is political: protesting against Greenland’sstatus as both an autonomous country and a part of the Kingdom of Denmark.
Comments (0)