Global Warming Is Redrawing the Arctic — and Awakening Tsunamis

But collapse isn’t a side effect. It’s the business plan.

A house flattened by the massive that slammed into the settlement of , Greenland, in 2017. (created by author)

The crack echoed like a gunshot across the bay — a glacier’s toe snapping free, crashing into the sea with a violence that felt out of place in the landscape of silence, a jagged slab of ice and a roar under my boots.

That was the very first time I saw a glacier calving.

I was only six and I was on a trip to Svalbard with my grandfather, the two of us on a boat to that debouches into . The ice looked terrifying and indomitable until the moment it fell apart. Because there’s a particular kind of stillness that settles over a dying glacier — a quiet so absolute it feels like the landscape is holding its breath before letting go.

That slow collapse is happening all across the Arctic — the ice is losing its last breaths.

Glaciers, those slow rivers of compressed snow, can still be found on , creeping downhill by just a few each day under the weight of their own gravity. Their upper reaches, piled high with snow over centuries, feed the lower stretches, which melt, thin, and disappear away under the weight of warmer air.