Observing Greenland from a helicopter, the main problem is one of comprehending scale. I have thought we were skimming low over the waves of a fjord, before noticing the tiny shadow of a seabird far below and realising what I suspected were floating shards of ice were in fact icebergs the size of office blocks.

The vast landmass is melting quickly due to climate change, and may rapidly cause the complete loss of the island's ice.

Pigmented algae are well adapted to grow on exposed ice in the Arctic as the snow line recedes, raising concerns of a feedback loop that could lead to faster sea level rise

New research, published in The Cryosphere, has identified a critical threshold—called a “tipping point”—that could determine whether the Greenland ice sheet can recover or if it will continue melting until it disappears completely.

Greenland's ice sheet currently spans over 1.7 million square kilometers and is the largest freshwater reservoir in the northern hemisphere. The ice sheet has already lost over a trillion tonnes of its total mass since the 1980s,