Living On The Thin Ice

In villages scattered across the Arctic Circle, global warming is threatening a centuries-old way of life. It’s an icy world that’s on its way to extinction, and whose inhabitants are facing exile

- Manon Quérouil-Bruneel

Seen from above, it looks like the surface of the moon. A stretch of blue-tinged craters, ringed in white: an ancient glacier that’s in the process of melting. Photographs showcasing the disappearing Arctic glacier prove, more powerfully than any statistics, that global warming is not an illusion created by alarmist climatologists. It’s a real, unfolding disaster that is threatening an ancestral way of life.

‘One warmer summer in Manchester, or a milder winter in Los Angeles, isn’t a crisis,’ says Bill McKibben, a researcher at Middlebury College in Vermont, USA. ‘But in the Arctic, where life is intricately bound up with the sea and the land, a whole world is disappearing along with the ice.’