A Warming Greenland Gives Birth to New Islands

Greenland is covered by roughly 2 million cubic kilometers of ice. That's enough to rise sea level by 7 meters, writes John Collins Rudolf in the NY Times (16.1.2007). He visits Greenland with a team of scientists and reports on the new phenomenon that ice and glaciers are retreating and give free new islands that were formerly bound to the glacier. Its a dramatic effect of global warming and challenges cartographers which have to redraw maps, "geography is becoming obsolete almost as soon as new maps are created," writes Rudolf. Greenland loses 240 cubic kilometers ice each year, and that's three times the volume of all glaciers of the Alps.