This roundup of The Conversation’s climate coverage was first published in our award-winning weekly climate action newsletter, Imagine.

“Observing Greenland from a helicopter,” one scientist wrote last year, “the main problem is one of comprehending scale. I thought we were skimming low over the waves of a fjord, before … realising what I suspected were floating shards of ice were in fact icebergs the size of office blocks. I thought we were hovering high in the sky over a featureless icy plane below, before bumping down gently onto ice only a few metres below us.”

This is the view described by Durham glaciologist Tom Chudley, when writing about his research showing the Greenland ice sheet isn’t just melting – it’s falling apart. Chudley and his colleagues found crevasses are growing fast, channelling meltwater deep into the ice sheet, accelerating its slide into the ocean.

And as the ice cracks, so does the geopolitical status quo.

Many world maps make Greenland seem even bigger than it actually is. The “Mercator projection” implies it’s almost the size of Africa, when in reality it is “only” about as big as the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Over my time in this job, I have noticed Greenland having a similarly outsized role in climate science. In recent years, The Conversation has published stories, among many others, on melting ice, climate-changing microbes, fast-adapting polar bears, Chudley’s creaking crevasses, the race to map........

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