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New Book: Iluliaq – Isbjerge – Icebergs

Posted by William Colgan on September 22, 2015
Climate Change, Communicating Science, Glaciers and Society / Comments Off on New Book: Iluliaq – Isbjerge – Icebergs

I was very pleased to have the opportunity to write a preface for Iluliaq – Isbjerge – Icebergs, which contains 100+ pages of watercolours and photographs depicting diverse icebergs around Greenland, along with accompanying Danish/English narration about the iceberg lifecycle (ISBN 978-87-93366-34-3 | available here). I am very supportive of projects like this, which seek to bridge the arts-sciences chasm. It was actually science-editing the iceberg factoids in this book that compelled me to start providing mass loss rates in equivalent tonnes per second in my subsequent publications. I now find saying that Greenland is losing 262 gigatonnes of ice per year, is more abstract than saying it is losing 8300 tonnes per second. Evidently, my perspective was shifted by this delightful project! Below I provide the preface in full.

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Preface for Iluliaq – Isbjerge – Icebergs:

“While an individual iceberg is ephemeral, icebergs are a ubiquitous feature of Greenland’s landscape. The shifting nature of icebergs, a constantly drifting and capsizing population, makes them challenging to observe. As they are partway through the transition from glacier ice into ocean water, icebergs are somewhat peripheral to both glaciology/geology and oceanography. Despite these intrinsic difficulties in their study, however, icebergs have never been more important to society than today. Due to climate change, Greenland’s glaciers are now flowing faster than a century ago. The resulting increase in Greenland’s iceberg production is now raising global sea level by 2 cm each decade.

In contrast to the iconic climate change indicators of diminishing sea ice area and glacier volume, there are now more icebergs being produced than a century ago. This provides a very strong motivation to understand the iceberg lifecycle. This lifecycle begins with a thunderous calving at genesis, followed by years of slow drifting and reduction, and quietly ends when the last ice melts into water. In this book, Pernille Kløvedal Nørgaard, Martin von Bülow and Ole Søndergaard provide visually compelling insights on selected aspects of this lifecycle.

By ensuring they not only communicate the natural majesty, but also climatic importance, of Greenland’s icebergs, the authors are helping icebergs assume a rightful place in contemporary public consciousness. The sense of humility evoked by the icebergs depicted here will be familiar to Arctic enthusiasts. These photos and watercolours represent multiple expeditions and extensive travels around Greenland. Similar to documentarians and artists who have accompanied polar expeditions since the Victorian Era, the authors have intentionally sought out a harsh environment, and invited confrontation with adverse conditions, to encapsulate a unique feature of Earth that most people could otherwise never appreciate. Society benefits from such hardy souls, whose passion for nature allows bleak and inaccessible landscapes to be transmitted into our civilized homes.”

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