An incredible music festival where instruments made of ice are played, Ice Music Festival Norway, has been held for 2 years in Finse, a place famous in Norway for its wild character: in winter it can only be reached by train and provides field d 'training for expeditions to Antarctica with temperatures approaching -30 and fierce snowstorms: unexpectedly this year the temperature has remained constantly above 0 and only a few times during the night it has dropped below it.
According to Norwegian singer Maria Skranes, what happened at Ice Music Festival Norway could be the right occasion to understand how Nature works. Spectators flocked from all over the globe to visit the ruins of the ice structures of the Festival, seeing with their own eyes the impact of Global Warming.
Having already planned it for some time (with tragic foresight), the meeting was held with a young scientist from Bjerknes Center for Climate Research, Silje Smith Johnsen. FIRSTonline asked her a few questions.
Dr. Silje, from your personal experience, could you first explain in detail what the Eastgrip project is all about?
“Of course, Eastgrip is an acronym for: East Greenland Ice Core Project, it is a project carried out primarily by Denmark but the company is funded by many other countries including Norway, the United States …”
Also from Italy?
“Yes, also from Italy, the goal is to drill an ice core in the middle of the Greenland ice sheet, this time it will be the first time that Eastgrip will drill an "ice river", it is practically a completely ice that flows much faster than the rest of the ice sheet, and that's great because this time we're not only going to get to gather more information about the climate and how the ice has been deposited over the ages but also about its life dynamics.
How this ice moves and what makes it so special, why it moves so fast compared to everything else, I went to the place last summer for the first time and will go again next summer for another month.
It's a really remote place, hundreds of kilometers from any trace of civilization, but you're there with 20/30 other people at the same time and you live in adequately heated tents, there's even a cook, what I mean is that it's comfortable and since it is so comfortable you have time to focus only on the science.”
By gathering information on the movement of 'rivers of ice' and how they will impact future rising sea levels, do you think the success of Eastgrip's project will help raise public awareness of climate change?
“The project costs a huge amount of money and a large part of it is directed towards the public awareness campaign to try and make people aware of the problem of melting glaciers, this is also one of the reasons why I am today here at Ice Music Festival Norway talking about this project and explaining to people about how sea level will rise and what we can expect in the near future due to climate change in Greenland.
Because if Greenland melts, the sea level will rise by 6-7 meters and therefore Rome or even my hometown Bergen will be submerged under water, even the whole of Holland and many of these islands near the Equator”.
Global Warming almost prevented Ice Music Festival Norway from happening, do you think the normal cycle of heat and cold is now leaning excessively towards a rise in temperature?
“Reading the graphs we can see how the climate in Finse has been warming up for some time, in January a few years ago temperatures below zero could usually be found, instead after 1985 Winters began to repeat again and again with temperatures above zero.
Periods of cooling and warming are normal in the climate history of a planet but now we see the latter happening with a greater incidence, this winter is one of those cases of warming, surely there will be cases of cooling as well because as the climate begins to change we will find ourselves faced with more extreme temperature ranges.
Last winter was a very good winter for example, we had snow even before Christmas and this was normal, people were happy because they could ski more even in the city which usually never happens in Bergen, but the current one instead it is turning out to be really bad.
The snow came late and we are in a trend where you can see that the weather in Finse is warming and has been warming since the mid 80s.”
And what about all the people who say these climate changes are normal and have happened in the past too?
“These climate changes have also happened in the past because there is natural variability, but in recent years we have obtained an accurate overview of how much CO2 is emitted by modern societies and if we put all this data into a graph we can see that when the number of salt emissions does it by correlating perfectly with the rise in temperature recorded globally, this is beyond doubt.
To be honest, the scientific community has no more doubts, we are now starting to try to predict where these climate changes will take us in the near future."
So could you tell me what will happen to the glaciers in Greenland if the trend is not reversed?
“Now I'll explain to you what is currently happening in Greenland: the ice sheet ends in the ocean and due to the fact that the ocean is warming up, the “feet” of this ice sheet have begun to melt, this process will go on until they won't hold back to such an extent that they end up on land, to the point where the entire Greenland ice sheet retreats entirely from the ocean.
In this scenario the warm ocean will no longer have any impact on it but when the ice surface on land also starts to melt and this water seeps into the base of the ice sheet it will make the rest of the ice more slippery and as a result it will slide into the ice sheet. ocean faster than it should.
For example, the river of ice we are studying in northeastern Greenland is extremely slippery.
Is the Finse glacier also in danger of disappearing?
“You think that Hardangerjøkulen will disappear within a century, my children may not see it, yet it has resisted for thousands of years, with these high temperatures the snow accumulated in Winter may not be able to overcome the Summer which is exactly the moment of growth of the glacier and if it does not receive "food" it will inevitably end up shrinking and disappearing.”
