Icy Island Warms to Climate Change

But for now, many hardy Greenlanders who wrest a living from the harsh environment see opportunities. Kim Hoegh-Dam's brother, Kenneth Hoegh, 41, is the agriculture advisory agent in southern Greenland. While his brother bets on fish, Kenneth Hoegh is busy developing new and unexpected markets for the small band of farmers in this self-governing dependency of Denmark.

Farmers raised 22,000 lambs for local meat markets last year, and Hoegh soon will host the chef of a renowned Copenhagen restaurant to persuade him to put "Arctic lamb" on the menu. Hoegh has six cows and wants to start a mini-dairy. He packs sheep wool off to England for sorting and then to Lithuania to be weaved into fine blankets labeled Greenland wool, a souvenir lure for tourists visiting the glaciers.

Tables in his office in Qaqortoq are loaded with potatoes to be planted on the warm edges of fiords. At his agriculture station, his staff is growing Chinese cabbage, flowers and turnips in greenhouses and under protective plastic sheets. He dreams of planting a forest someday on the treeless terrain.

"The only limiting factor on human endeavor in Greenland is the temperature," Hoegh said, while bouncing on a fast motorboat past icebergs to visit the agriculture station in this country of few roads. Warm the temperature a bit, and new endeavors pop out like lambs from ewes, he believes.

Six hundred miles to the north, 170 miles past the Arctic Circle, in the fishing village of Ilulissat, Inuit men gather around barrels of bait one afternoon as they thread hundreds of hooks attached to their long fishing lines. Traditionally, when the winter pack ice closed over the waters of their fiord, the men would take lines and nets on dog sleds and cut holes in the ice to catch Greenland halibut. But in recent winters, the pack ice never closed, and the men worked from their boats all year.

"It is much easier to go by boat than to try to haul everything by dogs," said Ove Olsvig, 39, a lean fisherman with a soft voice and few words. "We can catch a lot more." He paused. "I don't think it's good," he added. The higher catch will take its toll on the fish stock, he said. Then, "the fishing will not be so good."

Cuno Jensen, a 22-year-old teacher, walked by the dock carrying a rifle with a powerful scope. When he was a boy, he said, he and his father would go onto the ice and lie in wait for hours to get a shot at a seal. With the water now open year-round, "we just take a boat out, and it's easy to get close enough to shoot the seal."

Ono Fleischer, one of the most renowned dog sledders in Greenland, took a dog team across the huge island in 19 days last spring to marry his companion, Karo Thomsen, in a village in eastern Greenland. They intended to sled back, but a warm rain put a dangerous glaze on the ice cap. They had to give away their 12 dogs and fly back to Ilulissat.

"Already we are starting our sentences by saying, 'In the days when it was cold,' " reflected Thomsen, 45, who in 1991 became the first Greenland woman to ski across the ice cap. "We're starting to talk about it like it was history, and it's only been about five years."

Her husband has mushed for thousands of miles across the northern edges of Greenland, Canada and Alaska to match the record of the legendary explorer Knud Rasmussen. Yet he dismisses with a wave any sentiment over the shrinking ice.

"With the warmer weather, we don't have to fight the cold so much. Our health is better. Our equipment doesn't break down so much, and we don't use so much fuel. The time for industry is longer, and there are more places we can go by boat," Fleischer, 59, said before a lunch of reindeer meat in his house overlooking Ilulissat. "I can't think of any negative consequences."

But others, who depend on the ice, can. One of them is Silverio Scivoli. Up a steep hill from the colorful fishing fleet in Ilulissat harbor, he fishes for tourists. Last year, there were 15,000 -- mostly from Denmark -- and their spending has brought a spurt of construction in town. Scivoli, 59, a voluble Italian who came to visit Greenland 26 years ago and now runs a tourist agency, worries that the warmer weather will kill the very attractions the visitors come to see.