It’s often said that Inuit’s have
around one hundred words to describe snow and ice, but if you include rain in
that equation then there are probably many more words in the English language
for inclement weather, as our weather is just as important to us as a nation.
Most of Inuit words describe the condition of the snow and ice, in very much
the same way that we describe the British weather conditions. Feathery clumps
of falling snow are “qanipalaat” where as an icy mist is “pujurak” and wet snow
on top of ice is “putsinniq” .Since 80% of Greenland is covered in ice, the fall
of snow and movement of ice affects the Inuit’s lives in every respect. Their
whole lives revolve around hunting for seal on the ice flows with their dog
sledges and the seasonal break up of sea ice for fishing.
The Greenland ice sheet covers
1,710,000 square kilometers (660,235 sq mi), and is nearly 3 km thick in some
places. Although the huge domed icecap depresses the land mass with its weight,
the highest points still rise to around 3,000km. The present ice sheet is
around 110,000 years, but there has probably been ice covering the land for
around 18 million years. It was at one time much thicker than it is now but
with what is often referred to as global warming enough fresh water melts on
the icecaps each year to cover a country the size of Germany a meter deep. Melt
water collects in a number of fast flowing blue rivers high on the icecap and
pours into huge mile deep holes called moulins at a rate of around 42 million
litres each day.
Although summer comes for a brief few months, snow actually falls in
Greenland in every month of the year. Annual precipitation is substantially
heavier in the south than in the northern part of the island, which is
relatively arid. Since the temperature of the inland ice mass averages only 10
degrees Fahrenheit even in July, very little of the ice is lost by melting.
Instead, the snow continues to accumulate, gradually compressing into ice.
Although the sun can become extremely warm on a clear day high on the icecaps
and the surface of the ice melts and forms small rivulets that eventually form
larger streams. Strangely enough the
surface of Greenland rises at a rate of around 5.4cm per year probably due to
the heavy falls of snows which accumulates on the icecaps and form ice. In fact
the whole of the earth’s history can be told by taking ice core samples though
a mile of pressurized snow. Great events such as volcanic eruptions and nuclear
explosions are all recorded in the layers like a quilt on a bed.
