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Watch as Greenland melts

Published 11.09.08 13:25

Watch the Greenland ice cap melt before your very eyes using the Icecam A new webcam set up in Ilulissat will allow the world to watch as global warming eats away at Greenland's ice cap. The webcam is set up...

A new webcam set up in Ilulissat will allow the world to watch as global warming eats away at Greenland's ice cap.

The webcam is set up near the Ice Fjord, a Unesco World Heritage Site. The Ilulissat Glacier, which empties into the fjord, is the world's most active glacier. The glacier moves along at a pace of 22 metres per day and dumps a constant flow of ice into the fjord.

Each day, enormous boulders of ice break off Ilulissat Glacier and fall into the Ice Fjord. The largest of the constant rain of ice boulders that break off can be up to 1000 metres high and several hundred metres wide.

Some of the ice gets caught up on an underwater reef at the mouth of the fjord and are broken up into small icebergs. Others get forced out into the Davis Strait and open water.

Greenland's inland ice cap covers an area of 1.7 million square kilometres - about 80 percent of the country's total area. The ice cap covers 2.8 milion cubic kilometres of ice. If all of it melted at once, the world's oceans would rise by more than seven metres.

In some areas, the ice cap is over two km thick, and, at its deepest, it rises three kilometres over Greenland's bedrock. The ice is estimated to be about 110,000 years old. According to measurements by Nasa's Grace satellite 239 cubic km of the ice cap melt each year.

Visit the Sermitsiaq Icecam website.

The Copenhagen Post