At a gathering of the University of Bristol Spelaeological Society in a pub in 2008, caver Charlie Self handed PhD student Gina Moseley a photograph of a cave in a limestone cliff just beyond the north-western edge of the Greenland ice sheet. Thought to be the northernmost cave in the world, it had been photographed from a US military aircraft in 1958, but never explored.
But Self also gave Moseley a report about calcite flowstone, formed by trickling water, that was found in a cave in north-eastern Greenland. Today, groundwater there is frozen in permafrost, so this flowstone must have come from a warmer, wetter time. A sample could provide a climate record exceeding the 130,000 years captured in Greenland ice cores, Moseley thought.
Starting in 2015, Moseley and her partner, photographer Robbie Shone, mounted four expeditions to Greenland, finally reaching that northernmost known cave, pictured above. While they didn’t find any flowstone there, they did obtain some from caves in north-eastern Greenland that showed the ground there hadn’t frozen – and vegetation had even grown – during three periods between 5 million and 10 million years ago.
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It was a snapshot of a past world, but also a warning about how drastically global warming could alter Greenland in the future.
“This occurred in a world with CO2 levels that we already surpassed several decades ago,” says Moseley.
In the top image, expedition member Chris Blakeley stands in the entrance of the northernmost known cave, found on the Wulff Land peninsula, after rappelling down. Below, Blakeley explores a cave in north-eastern Greenland named Crystal Palace for the hoarfrost on its ceiling.
Below, Blakeley sits in Keyhole cave, named for the shape of its entrance, where the team collected two flowstone samples.
Shone calls the caves “time machines” that may be some of the last unexplored places on Earth, as there are no current Inuit settlements in north-eastern Greenland. But the team nonetheless witnessed the effects of human-made climate change there, including summer temperatures of 16°C.
“By early evening, after a full day of sunshine on the ice cap, the rivers were huge, they were bursting and they were brown,” says Shone. “You could physically see how much water had melted on the ice cap.”
Below, the team explores another cave in the area, after a 6-metre vertical climb to get into it. A huge coating of blue ice was found on the cave’s back wall.
In the final image, below, Blakeley and researcher Gabriella Koltai scramble to board a helicopter hovering near a cave in the Wulff Land peninsula before a storm arrives. The team named the cave R66 after the model of helicopter that rushed them out of there.
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