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Penned in by major land masses, most ice that forms in the Arctic Ocean stays there for the duration of its existence, typically one to four years before melting. Some ice, however, escapes the ocean through a handful of passages and then drifts south. That is the origin of the sea ice pictured here. When this image was taken in July, the ice had drifted more than 1,000km (600 miles) from the Arctic Ocean. The wide view above, acquired on 2 July with the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (Modis) on Nasa’s Aqua satellite, shows sea ice hugging the coast of east Greenland
Photograph: OLI/Landsat 8/Nasa
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These photographs were taken near the Sukkertoppen ice cap of south-west Greenland. In the black-and-white image, shot in the summer of 1935, glacier ice covers the rocky sides of a fjord, with many tongues flowing into an ice-covered lagoon
Photograph: Nasa
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By the summer of 2013, when this colour image was captured, the ice had retreated nearly two miles
Photograph: Nasa
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Chunks of ice float inside of meltwater pools on top of the Helheim glacier near Tasiilaq, Greenland, in June 2018
Photograph: Lucas Jackson/Reuters
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Sled dogs wading through standing water on the sea ice during an expedition in north-west Greenland last year. Researchers of the University of Copenhagen have warned that the Arctic pack ice is melting faster than scientific models predicted
Photograph: Steffen Olsen/Centre for Ocean and Ice at the/AFP/Getty Images
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Large rivers of meltwater drain into moulin holes that empty into the ocean from underneath the ice
Photograph: Caspar Haarlov/AP
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A meltwater canyon on the Greenland ice sheet. Surface melting across the mile-thick ice sheet increased in the 19th century as human activity started to warm the climate, but ramped up in the 20th and early 21st centuries and shows no signs of abating, say scientists
Photograph: Sarah Das/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution/PA
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Rivers of meltwater carve into the Greenland ice sheet near Sermeq Avangnardleq glacier in August 2019 near Ilulissat, Greenland
Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images
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Melting ice forms a lake on free-floating ice jammed into Ilulissat Icefjord
Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images
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A lake bounded to the left by Washington Land, a deglaciated peninsula that juts into the Kane Basin, and at right by the Humboldt Glacier, Greenland’s widest marine-terminating glacier
Photograph: John Sonntag/Operation Icebridge/Nasa/EPA
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Icebergs float at the mouth of Ilulissat Icefjord in August last year. Climate change is having a profound effect in Greenland, where over the last several decades summers have become longer and the rate that glaciers and the Greenland ice cap are retreating has accelerated
Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images
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An iceberg floats in Disko Bay in Ilulissat, Greenland
Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images
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Free-floating ice floats by Ilulissat Icefjord
Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images
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Visitors look out on to the free-floating ice
Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images
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Inuit fishermen prepare a net as ice floats behind them at the mouth of Ilulissat Icefjord last summer
Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images
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A boat sails next to a large iceberg in eastern Greenland. Melting ice could potentially cause a large rise in the world’s sea levels
Photograph: Felipe Dana/AP
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Icebergs in eastern Greenland
Photograph: Mstyslav Chernov/AP
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An iceberg calving with a mass of ice breaking away from the Apusiajik glacier, near Kulusuk, a settlement in the Sermersooq municipality located on the island of the same name on the south-eastern shore of Greenland
Photograph: Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP/Getty Images
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Outlet glaciers calving icebergs into the waters of Mogens Heinesen Fjord in south-west Greenland. About 400 million people would be exposed to coastal flooding every year by the end of the century if Greenland continued to lose ice at the same rate, scientists warned last December
Photograph: Benoit Lecavalier/PA
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Icebergs float along the eastern coast of Greenland near Kulusuk
Photograph: Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP/Getty Images
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Meltwater lakes on the edge of an ice cap in Greenland
Photograph: Keith Virgo/AP
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Meltwater flows into a fjord near Kangerlussuaq in western Greenland
Photograph: Caspar Haarlov/AP
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Small pieces of ice float in the water off Nuuk, the capital of Greenland
Photograph: Keith Virgo/AP
