“It was not our intention to discover a new island,” Arctic explorer and head of facilities at the Arctic station in Greenland, Morten Rasch, told Reuters. “We just went there to collect samples.”
Scientists initially thought they had reached Oodaaq, an island discovered by a Danish survey team in 1978. Only later, upon checking the exact location, did they realize that they had visited another island 780 meters northwest. .
“Everyone was happy to find what we thought was Oodaaq Island,” said Swiss entrepreneur Christiane Leister, creator of the Leister Foundation that funded the expedition.
“It’s a bit like the explorers of the past, who thought they had landed in a certain place but had actually found a totally different place.”
The small island, which measures about 30 meters in diameter and a peak of about three meters, is made up of mud from the seabed, as well as brown earth and rock that leave glaciers moving. The team said they would recommend that it be called “Qeqertaq Avannarleq”, meaning “the northernmost island” in Greenland.
Swiss businesswoman Christiane Leister created the Leister Foundation which funded the expedition that discovered the small island.
Julian Charriere / Reuters
Several American expeditions to the area have searched in recent decades for the northernmost island in the world. In 2007, Arctic veteran Dennis Schmitt discovered a similar island nearby.
Although it was exposed by a change of ice pack, scientists said that the appearance of the island now was not a direct consequence of global warming, which has been shrinking the ice sheet of Greenland.
Rene Forsberg, professor and head of geodynamics at the National Space Institute of Denmark, said the northern Greenland area has some dense polar sea ice, although he added that it was now 2-3 meters thick in the ‘summer, compared to the 4 meters of the first visited as part of the expedition that discovered Oodaaq in 1978.
Any hope of expanding territorial claims in the Arctic depends on whether it is in fact an island or a bank that may disappear again. An island must remain above sea level at high tide.
“It meets the criteria of an island,” Forsberg said. “It is currently the northernmost land in the world.”
But Forsberg, an adviser to the Danish government, said it was unlikely to change Denmark’s land claim in northern Greenland.
“This little island comes and goes,” he said.
The discovery was first reported on Friday by the Danish newspaper Weekendavisen.