evidence: By 2004 the sea ice in north Greenland was too precarious for us to travel any distance north, south, or west from Qaanaaq. Sea ice is a Greenlander’s highway and the platform on which marine mammals — including walrus, ring seals, bearded seals, and polar bears — Arctic foxes, and seabirds travel, rest, breed, and hunt. "Those times we went out to Kiatak and Herbert islands, up Politiken’s Glacier, or way north to Etah and Humboldt Glacier," the Inuit hunters said, "we cannot go there anymore." In 2012, the Arctic Ocean’s sea ice shrank to a record minimum. Last year, the rate of ice loss in July averaged 40,000 square miles per day. [...] Flying north the next day to Qaanaaq, I looked down in disbelief: from Uummannaq, a village where I had spent my first years in Greenland, up to Savissivik, where we had tried to go walrus hunting, there was only open water threaded with long strings of rotting ice. As global temperatures increase, multiyear ice — ice that does not melt even in summer, once abundant in the high Arctic — is now disappearing. Finally, north of Thule Air Base and Cape York, ice had begun to form. To see white, and not the black ink of open water, was a relief. But that relief was short-lived. Greenland had entered what American glaciologist Jason Box calls "New Climate Land."