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Homes in Munich the capital city of Greenland are selling like hotcakes a recent article in The Wall Street Journal's real estate section explains the ins and outs of buying an apartment or a house in nuke where the average price paid for a property is no close to $450000.00 u.s. Dollars present some may have got the cold shoulder from Denmark's president met a Fredrickson when he expressed an interest in buying the world's largest island a still has a constant by the way but that hasn't stopped international investors from beating a path there all of which frenzy may have something to do with the retreat of the ice and the changing face of the law and that's where the author John Gartner comes it in 10 to 15 John paid one of his visits to Greenland to observe the collapsing I see for himself the result is his latest book The Ice at the end of the world what's begins with some astonishing numbers so how much ice and water is Greenland losing annually if we go back in time a little bit to say the 1990 s. And early 1990 s. There wasn't really any clarity on how much Greenland was losing in terms of ice you know there were all these questions among scientists is the ice sheet and Greenland getting smaller is it even getting bigger but what we did was we put up a bunch of satellites that started to measure it and really for the 1990 s. It started losing maybe on average about 100000000 tons of ice per year but that has accelerated over the last decade and a half. 2012 was a massive year for melting and also for losing icebergs because there are actually 2 ways that Greenland is ice it meant melts on top where you get these extraordinary blue lakes and rivers that Russia the ice sheet and also loses ice on the edges where these massive icebergs kava often float. Way in Mill but in 2012 there was a massive ice loss that was more than 400000000000 tons of ice and this summer especially it was as a warm front moved over Europe and sort of hovered over Greenland there were these 2 massive melting events the calculations aren't finally in yet on how much ice has been lost but it's probably somewhere in the realm of $300000000000.00 to $350000000000.00 tons of ice staggering and yet this is the core the really floored me and the other big gave the book you say that that means almost nothing in the vastness of the. Well and if you go up to Greenland ice sheet you know this is a remnant of the last ice age and it it covers almost all of the island about 80 percent of the island in Greenland is the world's largest island it's it's 5 times the size of California in the center of the ice sheet it's 2 miles thick so the actual amount of ISIS is somewhere in the quadrillions of tonnes which is like you know should teens here owes after after 3 quadrillion tons and and to lose these hundreds of billions of tons it's a massive amount it raises ocean levels by about a millimeter per year at this point and we can see that you know Greenland if it continued at this pace you know the ice sheet might last 1000 years or more but what we also know is that it's accelerating and we know the Earth is getting warmer and we know that. Well we actually don't know exactly how though destabilized because nobody's ever been around to watch the melting of a nation but we do know that it's accelerating and that it's losing more and more ice with every passing decade and so there is a lot more ice to melt and the notion that Greenland is in the midst of a meltdown isn't really quite correct it's just starting. And just to be clear I suppose is something that we all think we know but but why study the melting ice in Greenland What's what's the point of all that sure I mean hundreds of millions of people around the world live really just within you know a few feet of sea level and certainly you know London is incredibly vulnerable to floods. I live on the East Coast of the United States where we've had massive flooding at times you know there are cities all over the world Jakarta comes to mind mammie especially these are cities that really I think face an axis tensional threat as ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica melt and it's not going to happen tomorrow but I think if we look a few decades ahead you know drip by drip year by year decade by decade you know the life of the city becomes threatened as these sea levels encroach So there might not be water up to everybody's knees right away but soon you know the infrastructure that's underground basic surfaces road flooding things that make city life untenable city life really begins to break down and then if we look even farther into the future we can see that you know this this flooding from a Sheetz you know it could effectively change the course of civilization as all of our cities around the world on the coast really become threatened by flooding and become in some ways possibly uninhabitable unless we change things around the book . Really divides into 2 on the one hand you've got the stories of exploration of Greenland the kind of exploration stories that we that with familiar with from other parts of the world other icy parts of the world anyway and then in the 2nd place part of the book you've got the advance of science and the science progresses so quickly so so let's for a few minutes just talk about the the exploration of space you know and the facts of it just being there that so attracted some of the the early explorers. Tell us a little bit for example about illicit Caden and Charles Hall and then there are their influence and Tyron on Commodore p.d. Who we've most of us have had a fight Yeah yeah I mean that you're exactly right I mean the book starts with that Age of Exploration in part because the work of later science was built on sort of some of the in rows that some of these folks made and you know a lot of those early explorations like Cain and they were some of them were looking for you know lost explorers who had perished in the Arctic or who had disappeared. You know others were trying to find a path to the North Pole so in this pre-modern ancient the 870 s. 880 s. 860 s. Even the idea. You know that you could you know certainly can take a plane you can take believing there is no way to get to the north pole it was unclear what it even looked at there and Cain and hall like a lot of these early Arctic explorations just ended in kind of complete utter tragedy Hala specially you know their ships would get locked in ice almost like Shackleton's down in Antarctica which that story we all know so well to where they can actually get anywhere get out or get far enough north. You know in Leader years. These became kind of inspirational to Piri to other explorers who were both looking from the North Pole but also exploring Greenland because they were trying to understand mistakes that had been made by previous explorers thinking Ok well we won't do it what hauled it or what came did our boat won't become our ship won't become locked in ice in the harbor so that we can't leave we will follow the seasons and we will succeed in finding a path to the north. You know it seems to me from you know really spending several years reading Arctic explorers diaries and memoirs that everything always kind of goes wrong in the Arctic you know and it's so rare to go right and and Piri really you know taking a cue from these early explorers had some absolute miserable crossings where he really barely made it across he was crossing the Greenland ice sheet and trying to get back and of course later in his career he tried to reach the North Pole and what was a what was the. That's a lovely name isn't it that lingers in the memory it is that and that was his 1st crossing of the Greenland ice sheet Piri was not actually the 1st person to cross it you have to go a few years earlier to free Josh Nansen a Norwegian who really was the 1st person to ever cross the Greenland ice sheet again in this era before technology when you couldn't fly over it there was no sense of what was in the middle and Manson recruited a small group of men and they actually climbed up half of the ice sheet because it's more like a dome than it is like a flat sheet and then they ski down the other half and this was in the late eighty's Peri's white March happened a few years later Nansen had already crossed the southern part of the ice sheet so for Pirie the white March was about crossing the northern part of the ice sheet it was a more ambitious crossing and he actually succeeded he crossed the northern part of the ice sheet which is actually wider and and made it back again just just barely almost almost out of food and out. Resources but with a dog team just barely bring him home and he actually did it twice and this was again early in his career before he started to try to get in or capturing the flagship North Pole the idea though of skiing. Part of Greenland you know for days and days days I mean that's hardly a ski able Sophos or is it. Yeah it in the center of the a sheet it can actually be pretty smooth I mean I think my you know I travel to Greenland 6 times for this book and in you know my conception of the ice sheet before it actually gone on to the center because you can actually fly to the center now if you have some scientists I sort of imagine the whole thing would be you know flatter like a skating rink somehow and it's not like that at all especially on the edges it's filled with crevices and it's quite dangerous and hills and something called Sister b. Which are these kind of rolling has shaped sort of wedges in the ice sheet but in the center of the ice it can actually be quite smooth and you can be a smooth hell that sort of heads down towards the coast so for Nansen skiing at least for part of his endeavor his mission it worked and he also you snowshoes but when he got closer to the coast when he hit all these dangerous curve asses they had to stop and they had to be to much more careful and in trying to actually get to the actual coastline and I've observed how many people wanted to live you know on the ice or even under the ice and in a later case you know you've got these these guys that you're honest Jordi and their nests arge make an ice bunker for themselves in 1930 that they very important doesn't it for future applications Yeah I mean at some point I'd say in the 1930 s. This kind of Age of Exploration changed into an age of science and there is a German expert. The that you mentioned and these 2 scientists I think it's pronounced and sorghum got to the center of the ice and they were waiting on the delivery of that never arrived and so what they did was they actually dug into the ice and created an under ice bunker and they weren't there for you know to sort of thump their chests and say you know we have lived under the ice what they were really there for was to collect data Joerg he was going to collect meteorological data temperatures and wind in all sorts of conditions and in sort of I was going to dig into the a sense trying to understand these layers of snow that build up into ice over you know what turns out to be hundreds of thousands of years but they lived in this bunker under the ice really all winter and they were the 1st 2 to ever winter over on the Greenland ice sheet and again it was it was an absolutely miserable experience but it became quite legendary and I think I might add that you know as a writer it was quite exciting to write about because really it became a matter of life and death trying to survive that winter for sure that and what they did allowed the u.s. Military to to get some kind of an idea of ice with actually behave if if it was dug into and it was sort of overhead Yeah I mean in later years were not that long after probably just after World War 2 So in the 1950 s. The United States military began to look to Greenland as sort of the next frontier in the Cold War and the idea kind of came it seems a little bit preposterous now going back. That maybe the u.s. Military could build an under ice bunker like a vast camp of people who had lived there and the idea was also kind of joined to this other notion that maybe they could have nuclear weapons that they could kind of deploy towards the Soviet Union you know the great thing. At the cross the Arctic circle if necessary and they ended up building you know what I mean very very large camp under the ice that was called Camp Century you know the reason that's in my book is that yes it's a good story but and yes it was this military endeavor but what I also happened was a lot of scientists kind of piggybacked on the u.s. Army's expend you know they they were in that era of the Cold War you know there was there was a lot of money there was a lot of resources and some scientists use that opportunity to actually study the ice sheet in a way that had never been studied the core so that really the were were the military using science as a cover or was it the other way or as you said. It's a really interesting question and I think that it worked a little bit of both ways I mean when the scientists were there the military was saying we're here to investigate you know how to how how to really to kind of outfit and position an army in the Arctic because we think it's vital for national defense and we need to understand the science of the Arctic to actually do that and it was a cover for sort of you know deploying or at least investigating how to really kind of deploy missiles and bombs and tactical defenses in those areas. You know but I think you know for for real that they it was also the case that they used the science that came out of there such as how to build buildings on an icy literally or how to travel over an ice sheet so it did end up having some military value but it for the scientists at least it had some lingering value at least for us today in a way that it had helped us understand how the ice sheet is and how it worked. And going back from it to the to the German throughout a saga he actually did some really important science didn't he what what what did he do I mean his science was all about the ice how did the study it sure so there are these 2 guys stuck under the ice for an entire winter with no radio no television barely any she will and what they could do is they could sort of do their scientific experiments so sort of decided to dig a hole literally to just dig down into the ice they dug a staircase into the ice they went about 50 feet down and what he started to study was how the layers in the ice sheet build up over time and he measured different kinds of density to these sort of stripes in the ice because really what in a sheet is is is this kind of. You know cruel of snow cover that year by year kind of pushes down on what came before and what sort of work eventually led to was this idea that you could not just dig a hole into the ice and out to stick a staircase but you could you drill down into the Yanks and extract what we now call an ice core and that you could go down way deeper than 50 feet which is what sort of did and go to the very bottom which would be really you know 2 miles down and you could use this ancient ice to reconstruct ancient temperatures maybe even to reconstruct what the ancient atmosphere was like because there are bubbles sealed in the ice that capture the air at the time it was sealed off and that of course brings us really to to drilling ice cores I mean we've we've all seen Well some of us least have seen the day after tomorrow you know what starts for the team drilling on ice core and that seems to be kind of a mandatory if you're going to do a science now doesn't it to the delight the ice cores who who took the 1st one yeah I mean I guess the very 1st one really was or the 1st important one was Camp Century that army base wheat. About that was under the ice in the early 1960 s. And some scientists again using the u.s. Military's resources set up a drilling rig in this camp under the ice and they just kind of drilled through the floor because the floor was from Chris really made of ice and they went down to the bottom it took them a few years they were only drilling during the summer and it wasn't really the center of the a she so it wasn't fully 2 miles down but it was I think was about a mile and some and they they brought up the 1st continuous Peace Corps to the bedrock of Greenland and what you do is you don't pull out that core all at once of course you take it out and sort of income and so you would get these you know 3 meter or 5 meter sort of blanks of ice and then kind of label them and bag them and keep them cold so they can be studied but then I still exists it's in lie i slime berries in Copenhagen and in the United States and it really was the 1st time that we had this sort of long continuous record from Greenland ice she has got a base insatiable of voluble know hasn't it that ice core Yeah I mean in in truth there are been sort of more valuable ones from a science perspective ones that are more Christine ones that capture a longer record and those have been done both in the center Greenland and they've been done in Antarctica and an article actually even goes back farther than Greenland's ice you know the different the different ice cores have different you know the pluses and minuses and they they have different virtues to scientists but but but a lot of that ice exists in these ice libraries for my own research for my book I traveled to Colorado and to Copenhagen where they keep a lot of these important ice cores and they're still there and they're still studied and scientists come from all around the world to take a cut of this ice and look at it under microscopes and do all sorts of chemical analysis to make sure to really look at trace elements and chemicals that sort of. Help them a lot riddles of ancient climates So let's let's go to the ninety's and a young climate scientists called right to dally who makes pretty astonishing the sky every. About climate variation. So yeah there had been some ice cores that had come up by some Danish teams especially and Americans that had suggested that there were these greater variations in climate this notion that you know our climate kind of changes very slowly over time you know whether it's based on you know increasing c o 2 levels or some other sort of forcing element that climate doesn't jump from one state to another but. Several of the ice cores coming out of this coring experiment and the center Greenland in the early 1990 s. Showed that really climate can jump dramatically and in fact there was one of that 11700 years ago where you know the temperatures in in and around Greenland probably went you know changed you know more than 10 about 10 degrees centigrade I think within you know or a degree centigrade just within a decade or so with became known I think is as abrupt climate change was was given a kind of very real proof by this ice core that this can't happen the reason