Global warming is hitting hard in Greenland and the Arctic

The sun is breaking through the clouds, and the temperature is approaching 7-8°C this afternoon in Ilulissat, western Greenland. Small groups of tourists make their way through the town towards the viewpoints, where they can watch the enormous icebergs slowly drift into Disko Bay from the UNESCO-listed Ilulissat Icefjord.

Further into the fjord lies Sermeq Kujalleq, formerly known as Jakobshavn Glacier, one of the fastest-flowing glaciers in the world.

The effects of climate change are clearly felt here north of the Arctic Circle. In Ilulissat, January set a new temperature record with an average temperature of -1.6°C. That is 1.3°C warmer than the previous January record from 1929 and 11°C warmer than the January climate normal for the 1991-2020 period.

Sermeq Kujalleq in the Icefjord is one of the glaciers that transports the largest volumes of ice from the Greenland Ice Sheet into the sea. The ice loss from this glacier alone contributes up to three per cent of global sea-level rise. The Greenland Ice Sheet is a single, continuous mass of ice that transports vast amounts of ice from the interior of Greenland to the coast through hundreds of glaciers, where it enters the ocean as icebergs or meltwater.

Greenland and the Arctic feature prominently in the new climate report, European State of the Climate 2025 , published earlier this year with contributions from DTU Space. According to the report, the Arctic is the fastest-warming region in the world.

”The Arctic is responding to global warming faster than most other places on Earth. That is why it is crucial to understand the interaction between the ice masses, the ocean and the ecosystems. This knowledge is essential if we are to predict and manage the consequences of future climate change,” says Professor and climate researcher Shfaqat Abbas Khan from DTU Space.

This July, Shfaqat Abbas Khan is in Ilulissat for a status conference and workshop organised as part of the major international climate research project, the Centre for Ice-Sheet and Sea-Level Predictions (CISP), funded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation and led by the professor.

The aim of CISP is to develop a new generation of data-driven models capable of describing changes in the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets and integrating them into a global model of the world's melting ice masses. In the longer term, the models will provide far more accurate projections of future sea-level rise along coastlines around the world.

A trip onto the Greenland Ice Sheet requires careful planning

At the same time, Shfaqat Abbas Khan and some of his colleagues are taking the opportunity to travel out onto the Greenland Ice Sheet at Sermeq Kujalleq.

Some of the many GPS monitoring stations used to track the movement of the ice sheet are located here.

”We have equipment installed on the glacier that we need to inspect and retrieve data from. Sometimes we have to dig it out of the snow and ice first. We're used to that,” says the professor, who has just returned from a helicopter trip onto the glacier together with DTU Space postdoctoral researchers Danjal Longfors Berg and Javed Hassan.

On this day, they managed to visit five stations and travel several hundred kilometres across the ice before fog brought the day's flights to an end. But the professor is pleased that they were able to make the trip at all. The weather and the many tourists eager to go on excursions during the summer make it something of a challenge to book a helicopter to go there.

Most of the monitoring stations in Greenland can only be reached by helicopter, and only if the pilot considers the weather conditions safe enough to fly. Fog or strong winds can force a planned mission to be cancelled at just a few hours' notice.

When the researchers arrive, they move through a landscape criss-crossed by deep crevasses in the ice, where a fall can be fatal. That is why every mission is carefully planned. They wear safety lines when they step out of the helicopter and venture onto the ice. A firearm is also always carried in the helicopter in case a polar bear appears and needs to be scared away.

Just outside Ilulissat, the glacier transports enormous volumes of ice from the Greenland Ice Sheet into the Icefjord. Here, the ice either melts or breaks away as icebergs. In this way, the glacier continuously contributes to the overall ice loss from the Greenland Ice Sheet, which is one of the main contributors to global sea-level rise.

Behind the data used in research and reports lie decades of painstaking work measuring and modelling sea ice, the Greenland Ice Sheet and sea level. Data are collected using instruments installed directly on the ice, from aircraft and satellites, and to some extent from ships monitoring the glaciers.

DTU Space contributes key ice and glacier data to new climate report

Researchers from DTU Space have contributed to the mapping of the Greenland Ice Sheet in the European State of the Climate 2025 report.

Although the new climate report primarily describes developments in Europe's climate, it also includes a comprehensive section on Greenland and the Arctic because changes in the region are becoming increasingly significant, both regionally, for continental Europe and globally.

”The Greenland chapter is an important new addition to the report. We have contributed to mapping changes in the surface elevation of the Greenland Ice Sheet between 1991 and 2025, which can be used to monitor where the ice is becoming thicker or thinner over time,” says Natalia Havelund, a postdoctoral researcher at DTU Space.

In the report, changes in glacier surface elevation are visualised using colour coding in the graphic 'Ice Sheet Elevation Change Trend'. Sermeq Kujalleq appears in dark blue, indicating a decline in surface elevation and identifying it as one of the places in the Arctic where ice-sheet melt is most pronounced.

”The map clearly shows that the greatest changes in surface elevation occur at the fast-flowing glaciers along the coast, underlining the close link between ice flow and ice mass loss,” says Natalia Havelund.

European heatwave extended towards the Arctic

Both Europe and Greenland are warming faster than the global average, the report notes.

It shows that temperatures in the Arctic have risen by around 3.2°C since the pre-industrial era. For Europe, the increase is 2.4°C, while the global average temperature has risen by 1.4°C over the same period.

According to the report, Europe experienced its warmest year on record in 2025. Significant temperature records were also set further north, close to the Arctic Circle and the Arctic region. During an unusually prolonged heatwave last summer, a temperature of 34.9°C was recorded in Frosta Municipality in Norway, not far from the Arctic Circle.

It does not get that warm in Ilulissat. But on mild days, temperatures in the sun can locally exceed 20°C in the small hollows and hills behind the town near the ice, says Shfaqat Abbas Khan.

“This is one of the places in the Arctic and Greenland experiencing some of the most significant impacts of climate change. The trend of rising temperatures and increasing ice loss that we have observed in recent years appears set to continue,” says Shfaqat Abbas Khan.

Greenland's ice tells its own story

Individual warm days or heatwaves in the Arctic cannot be directly attributed to climate change.

But they fit into a pattern in which temperatures are rising faster in the region than in the rest of the world, while vast amounts of ice disappear year after year.

According to European State of the Climate 2025, the Greenland Ice Sheet lost around 139 gigatonnes of ice in 2025. That corresponds to an average loss of approximately 2–3 cubic kilometres of ice per week, or one and a half times the total volume of ice contained in the glaciers of the European Alps. Similar amounts of ice have been lost from Greenland every year since the beginning of the 1990s.

The trend is also evident in the warming oceans. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Arctic Report Card 2025 points to widespread changes in the Arctic marine environment, including the inflow of warmer, more saline Atlantic water into Greenland's fjords, contributing to the warming of the region.

In Greenland, the landscape along the ice margin tells its own quiet story, notes Shfaqat Abbas Khan, who witnesses it during his frequent visits to the melting glaciers.

In several places, broad belts of grey, stony ground can be seen between the ice and the green vegetation that has become established farther away.

”The unvegetated areas are places where the ice has disappeared in recent decades, and they continue to expand. In some places they are up to 40 kilometres wide. This has happened over the past approximately 80 years, and the process is continuing,” says Shfaqat Abbas Khan.

”It is clear evidence that the glaciers are melting and retreating on a very large scale. We need to understand the consequences of this development so that we can address them”.