“Listen to the ice…

“Put your hands on the ice, listen to it, smell it, look at it -and witness the ecological Changes our world is undergoing.”

Lochan a Chnapaich, Being Dear, Ullapool

Lochan an Cnappaich, Beinn Dearg, North West Highlands Scotland

Some years ago I was lucky enough to spend a month on the ice in Greenland. I was leading an expedition of women climbers and filming the trip for National Geographic.

The trip changed me in so many ways. For the first time I listened to the ice. I saw first-hand the ravages of global warming on these massive seemingly in dominatable seas of ice.

The scale and the vastness of the place is hard to convey but I remember our first week on the glacier, ferrying our loads of camping, climbing and filming gear, first on foot and then dragged behind us on bright orange sleds, it seemed like our destination was just a few hours away, the horizon seemed both near and far. A week of pulling, hauling, dragging later we arrived at that far horizon, our campsite for the month. The vastness of the ice cap suddenly real and for a whole month we saw nothing and no-one except each other and the occasional transatlantic plane in the sky

We climbed, explored, and mapped our small corner Greenland, and then eventually packed up camp and headed west on skies to meet our fishing boat transport on the far side of the peninsula. Our struggles with the glacier on the journey out were many, glacial meltwater forming dangerous fast flowing rivers sitting atop the ice, bottomless blue crevasses and our final challenge, finding a way off a glacier which had receded five kilometres or more to be left ravaged and precarious.

I wonder, what does that glacier look like now, twenty years on?