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I had the privilege of being invited to take part in the development of the Icefjord Centre by the architect who designed the building. We agreed that it should be a meeting place. A place for tourists and locals to meet as well as a place where different times – past and future – meet and are tied together. Here we can tell the story about what ice and the ice ages have meant and continue to mean for human beings. About the first Stone Age people who settled here 4,400 years ago, established the settlement of Sermermiut and are now known as the Saqqaq people. And how, by studying the layers of the inland ice, we can see volcanic eruptions, historical climate change and the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. From a strictly selfish perspective, the current climate change has been a positive influence for Greenland. Times are good. But the vast majority of Greenlanders are well aware that on a global scale, climate change is a worrying development. Therefore, Greenland should not just be a symbol of this but part of the solution. Over the past few years, I have been working with a team of scientists to collect so-called glacier flour: particles of rock that the glaciers create and carry with them as they scrape over the mountains in Greenland. Glacier flour is full of minerals that can be used as natural fertilizer on fields in other parts of the world, especially in tropical regions. In our test sites, the yield has increased by 30 to 50 per cent. Naturally, we should take advantage of this, just as we should seize the opportunity to use
