Language skills Extras Explore 11 Saving the world 147 Glaciers With a partner, look at the photos and ■■ compare and contrast them. ■■ speculate about how many years have elapsed between them. ■■ discuss what could have caused the changes. Speaking 7 A B Read the beginning of an article about Greenland. What does the writer mean by: 1 “calving season”? 2 “a flotilla of icebergs”? 3 “eerily beautiful”? Reading 8 a The Sermilik fjord in Greenland: a chilling view of a warming world It is calving season in the Arctic. A flotilla of icebergs, some as jagged as fairytale castles and others as smooth as dinosaur eggs, calve from the ice sheet that smothers Greenland and sail down the fjords. The journey of these sculptures of ice from glaciers to ocean is eerily beautiful and utterly terrifying. The wall of ice that rises behind Sermilik fjord stretches for 2,400 km from north to south and smothers 80% of this country. It has been frozen for three million years. Why do you think the writer says this is “a chilling view” and that the icebergs are “utterly terrifying”? Read the rest of the article quickly. What seems to be happening in Greenland? Do scientists fully understand it? b 9 a Now it is melting, far faster than the climate models predicted and far more decisively than any political action to fight our changing climate. If the Greenland ice sheet disappeared, sea levels around the world would rise by seven metres, as 10% of the world’s fresh water is currently frozen here. Experts from around the world are landing on the ice sheet in a race against time to discover why the ice in Greenland is vanishing so much faster than expected. Gordon Hamilton, a Scottish-born glaciologist, hit upon the daring idea of landing on a moving glacier in a helicopter to measure its speed. When Hamilton processed his first measurements of the glacier’s speed, he found it was marching forwards at a greater pace than a glacier had ever been observed to flow before. “We were blown away because we realised that the glaciers had accelerated not just by a little bit but by a lot,” he says. The three glaciers they studied had abruptly increased the speed by which they were transmitting ice from the ice sheet into the ocean. Driven by the loss of ice, Arctic temperatures are warming more quickly than other parts of the world. For centuries, the ice sheets maintained an equilibrium: glaciers calved off icebergs and sent melt water Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv
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