Independent filmmaker Bertrand Lozay have made a video performance alone on the Greenlandic sea-ice.

As a video-artist mr. Lozay got his movie screened in several places in Europe and Greenland. This shows you a clip of the 30 minutes DVD. The DVD is available in French, English, Greenlandic and Danish and can be purchased by emailing This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

The Arctic Council Senior Arctic Officials together with some 90 delegates of the Arctic states, Permanent Participants, and accredited Observers  have completed two days of meeting, 28-29 May 2010. The meeting took place North of  the Arctic Circle in the West Greenlandic town of Ilulissat prominently located next to the UNESCO World Heritage listed Ilulissat Icefjord.

On the agenda were ongoing programs and concerns of the Arctic Council Stakeholders thematically arranged under headings such as Climate Change, Biodiversity, Monitoring, Oceans, and the Council's communications and outreach plans.

Outside the panoramic windows of the meeting venue overlooking Ilulissat with its lively colored houses scattered out over a rocky landscape, the Disko Bay filled with giant icebergs. These icebergs is produced by the worlds most productive glacier, the Sermeq Kujalleq ("Southern Ice") in the bottom of the Ilulissat Icefjord, from where they gently sail out to sea.

The icebergs reaches heights of up to 50 meters. Yet, the meeting participants were informed, in former times true monsters stretched up to 3 times as high into the air.  This information emerged during a dinner hosted by the Greenland Government on the first evening of the meeting.

In connection with the dinner, hunter and fisherman Johannes Mathæussen made a presentation on climate changes as experienced by someone subsisting on the living resources of the Disko Bay area. Johannes explained to a fascinated audience that, while he had in fact experienced the arrival of new fish, wildlife, and insect species in the area, he did not find that the quality of traditional food sources had as such deteriorated due to climate changes.

However, one of the weirdest and most unpredictable effects attributed to climate change, according to Johannes Mathæussen, was the fact that the length of the arctic night had shortened. The sun, he elaborated, according to observations of  Ilulissat inhabitants, nowadays returns to the  sky one day earlier than it used to on this particular latitude within the Arctic Circle. Local residents assume  that this phenomenon is connected to a possible shrinking of the surrounding Inland ice sheet.

Discovering the Arctic is the name of a web learning facility developed and recently launched by the Royal Geographical Society. It is aimed at the secondary school level (14-16 year olds) in the United Kingdom. According to the Royal Geographical Society, it is intended to be a resource to be dipped into depending on specific curriculum needs and priorities.
The Discovering the Arctic website seems biased toward what, according to a widespread view, constitutes the quintessential Arctic, viz. the high North of Greenland and Canada, and thus gives preference to the Inuit whereas peoples and places of Arctic Russian Federation get comparatively less coverage.

While tending to over-expose the Inuit, at the same time the information rendered about Inuit is rather superficial and sometimes incorrect. For instance, the website makes no attempt to correct the common misunderstanding that Inuit is a noun in the singular that becomes Inuits in the plural, whereas Inuit is in fact plural of the singular Inuk. 

Bearing in mind that the main target group is non-Arctic secondary school children and that, consequently, the knowledge presented should not be too specialised or complex, even so, or even more so, the Royal Geographical Society's learning facility should correct rather than reproduce common misrepresentations of this sort. Hopefully, it will do so in its future versions. Otherwise, this resource appears well conceived pedagogically and deserves the chance to evolve, perhaps by incorporating in its updated versions mechanisms that allow interactive feedback from advancing pupils or from expert circumpolar youth. Such feedback could help the website improve itself and eventually become truly state of the Arctic.

The Greenlandic newspaper AG reports of a summer of records in terms of warmth and dryness. Scientists from all over the world are busy monitoring one of the planets most magnificent and spectacular climate change barometers, the Kangia glacier in Western Greenland. Majestic and awe-inspiring as the glacier remains, with a front that stretches 5 kilometres across the fjord, it is on a hasty retreat ever farther into the fjord, leaving its mark of barren, formerly ice-covered rock. Especially since 2001, the retreat of the glacier has accelerated so that its front is now positioned deeper into the fjord than ever before. At the same time, the speed of the ice being transported in the opposite direction out into the fjord is also increasing  - reaching a speed of 40 metres per day – so that, while no longer producing quite as impressive icebergs as it used to, the glacier is nonetheless sending out a record-breaking more than 40 cubic kilometres of ice into the sea per year. In the same World Heritage environment of the Kangia Ice-fjord, earlier this summer a wildfire raged through the  landscape around the listed, prehistoric ruins Sermermiut. Meteorological measurements from various parts of Greenland unequivocally tell of an exceptionally hot and dry summer, a fact that gets corroborated by many dried out lakes and waterways. Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, has experienced an bone-dry month of July receiving only 1,4 millimetres of rain as opposed to an average of 86 millimetres. In Northern Greenland, in Qaanaaq, the mean temperature of July rose to 8,3 degrees Celsius as compared with the mere 4,5 degrees of a normal year. Hunter Uusaqqak Qujaukitsoq tells about conspicuous changes to the fauna: ”-Never before in my life have I seen so many flies. If food is left outside the house, it gets completely covered by flies in no time. It is not the ordinary kind of flies that everyone knows. It is a species entirely new to this place. They are very big and have red legs,” he says to AG, and continues, ”- A lot of very large jellyfish get caught in my salmon nets. I do not know if they sting, so I remove them only with gloves on my hands.” At the same time, in the opposite, Southern part of the country, sheep herder Jørgen Lund of Inneruulalik near Narsarsuaq reports of failing crops as well as lambs much smaller than usual due to dwindling pastures. Jørgen Lund estimates his lambs to weigh somewhere between a half and one kilogram less than they normally would.

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