As a poster-child for climate change, it's probably as good as it gets. A previously unknown island has emerged from beneath melted ice off the east coast of Greenland.
We knew the land was there, but until Arctic explorer Dennis Schmitt, from California, spotted a thawed strait on an expedition in summer 2005, no-one had realised that the island was not connected to the mainland. Schmitt has named the new island Uunartoq Qeqertoq, which means "the warming island
The New York Times first brought Schmitt's story to a wider audience
in January, and The Independent, a UK newspaper, reported the discovery
on Tuesday. You can watch a short documentary film about Schmitt and the island here
I spoke to Schmitt yesterday, and he had more stories to tell me than I could fit in this blog post. Schmitt speaks the Inuit language and has spent much of his life in the icy north, whether on the back of a dogsled or sailing an icebreaker boat.
In the 1990s he found a rocky islet in the far north above Greenland, emerging from the sea "like a great rock whale". He tried to persuade the Danish government to recognise the find as the most northerly piece of land on earth – officially this point is an island called Kaffeklubben
- but unfortunately failed, because the islet turned out to be a transitory mound of glacial moraine.
He is clearly passionate about his most recent discovery and the effects of global warming. "It's a stunningly beautiful island with tooth-like peaks," he says. "This island is probably the world's most spectacular example of climate change."
Not everyone agrees with this latter assessment of course. Some say we should be more worried about inhabited islands disappearing due to sea-level rise than remote reaches of the Arctic. Rita Gardner, director of the UK's Royal Geographical Society
points out that Pacific islands such as Kiribati and the Marshall islands could disappear altogether by 2100 due to climate change. "We could lose more islands than we discover," she says.
Still, that shouldn't diminish Schmitt's find. I can't help but admire his attitude to old-school exploration. He is now planning more expeditions further north of the region where he spotted Warming Island, and expects more land to emerge as the icecap retreats. In a world when we can see every acre of the earth's surface from a satellite, Schmitt's kind is a dying breed.Richard Fisher, Careers Editor