Police have taken a helicopter to the hamlet of Nutaarmiut, about 90km from Upernavik in west central Greenland.

“We have been informed by a citizen that three people have been shot and killed in Nutaarmiut and two people are said to be injured,” Claus Risbjerg of the Greenland Central Police Authority said in a Politken report.

Nutaarmiut is home to around 55 people and is one of many small hunting communities in the country that does not have a permanent police presence.

“We have no information on who did this. We have a helicopter due to land up there soon with police, a doctor and nurses. When we have our people on the scene, we will have further information,” Risbjerg said.

Cartographers for the Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World, last released in September 2011, have admitted they were wrong to omit around 300,000 square kilometres of polar ice from sea surrounding Greenland.

British Publishers HarperCollins originally defended the accuracy of the map, which was released with promotional material about the fast acceleration of global warming. The blunder was exposed by scientists however, who said that the chart contradicted the most recent satellite images.

Publishing editor Jethro Lennox told the Scotsman, “After publication of the 13th edition of The Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World, it became apparent that we had not represented the permanent ice cover in Greenland fully and clearly.

“In failing to do that, this section of the map did not meet the usual high standards of accuracy and reliability that the atlas strives to uphold. To correct this, we decided to produce a new, more detailed map using the latest information available,” he added.

The updated section, which will be inserted into any remaining copies, was put together after consultation with a number of experts. Liz Morris from the Polar Research Institute at Cambridge University said, “This was a really bad mapping error. If 15 percent of ice was lost, then sea levels would have risen by one metre, and that hasn’t happened.”

(Photo: Anders Peter Amsnæs)

There has long been a question mark over whether or not the southern Greenlandic climate was warm enough in Viking times to grow grain for beer, mead, gruel and bread.

Now Danish archaeologists have found remains of burnt barley in a dunghill from the time when Erik the Red and other Icelanders moved to Greenland. The find is the first evidence of corn cultivation in southern Greenland a thousand years ago.

According to Jyllandsposten, the archaeologists are very proud of their find and are even shipping 300 kilogrammes of the dunghill home to Denmark for further research.

A deal has been signed for Statoil to acquire a 30.6 percent stake in one of the British explorer’s Greenland licenses, showing interest in the Arctic remains strong despite recent high-profile failures.

“The exact financial terms of the agreement are confidential,” Cairn said, according to a Reuters report. It added, however, that the Norwegian company would be paying some of the past and future exploration costs and a bonus on signing the deal.

Cairn has spent USD 1.2 billion on projects in the Arctic over the last two years, but has so far failed to get any conclusive shows. It is believed that the company hoped to get funding for all future drilling costs, but their lack of success so far has forced them to offer “attractive” partnership terms to investors.

“Arctic specialist Statoil’s early entry into a part of Cairn’s Greenland acreage, on attractive terms, validates the industry’s and Cairn’s long-held belief in the region’s multi-billion barrel exploration potential,” Morgan Stanley analysts said in a note.

Environmental groups have attempted to disrupt Cairn’s activities in the Arctic several times, pointing out than an oil spill in the pristine region would be detrimental to wildlife and almost impossible to clean up. It is thought, however, that Greenland could hold as many as 20 billion barrels of oil, making the semi-autonomous Danish island one the world’s biggest producers.

(Photos: Anders Peter Amsnæs)

The areas for which search licences are being offered lie in the high Arctic; far north of Iceland and not too far from Svalbard. They are north of Scoresbysund between 75 and 79 degrees north. The areas are being offered in two stages; the first in 2012 and the second in 2013. Applications from oil companies to be permitted to take part must be received by the 1st March and for specific location licences, by the 15th December. The exploration licences will last for 16 years, with the option for extension up to 30 years.

It is now ten years since oil exploration licences were first offered off western Greenland and the country has since offered a new area for exploration on average once every two years, Vísir.is reports. There are some 20 licences currently active, which are held by companies including Statoil, ExxonMobil, BP, ChevronTexaco, Shell and Japan Oil. Canada’s Husky Energy has announced it will drill two test wells in Greenlandic waters in summer 2013.

The first company to find oil and gas in Greenland was the UK’s Cairn Energy in the autumn of 2010 off Disko Island, 200 km north of Nuuk. The company put its programme on hold this winter, however, after drilling eight holes at great cost, without finding enough evidence of fossil fuels to make it worthwhile.

This disappointment does not seem to have dampened the spirits of other oil companies. The head of Greenland’s oil and minerals directorate, Jörn Skov Nielsen, told reporters that all of the world’s oil giants are interested in the east Greenland prospecting auction. Norway’s now-successful oil industry had a similarly disappointing start and the idea was nearly dropped after three years of expensive and fruitless searching.

There is strong opposition to Arctic drilling among environmental groups who say the fragile Arctic ecosystem is less able to cope than other regions and that a major oil spill would be next to impossible to clean up.

The ten-month-old hooded grey pup, known as Eve, most recently paid a visit to Skegness after previously being spotted in Germany, where she was fitted with a GPS tracker, followed by Scotland and the south of England.

The Natureland sanctuary in Skegness is now caring for the intrepid pup and appealing for donations to help pay for her flight back to the Arctic region. Seals from Greenland, Iceland and Canada rarely make it as far as the North Sea.

“No one knows why Eve got lost and travelled so far,” said Cheryl Yeadon from Naturland in a Daily Mail report. “She is still a baby and we think she hasn’t learnt how to cope on her own away from her mum.

“Seals only feed on their mother’s milk for four days before they have to learn to fend for themselves. We are keeping Eve with other seals to teach her about competition for food. Our best option is to get her closer to where she would come from in the wild.

“It is not unusual for seals to travel long distances, but we have never known one to travel as far – and in the wrong direction – as Eve,” Ms Yeadon added.

The organisation hopes that the commercial hunting of the animals, a practice common in Greenland and Canada, will effectively be halted by the agreement.

The decision was made to protect sea mammals, with seal hunting categorised as a particularly harsh form of hunting. Russia is the biggest buyer of seal skins and whale calves skins, which are mainly supplied by Canada.

Maria Vorontsova, the director of the Moscow IFAW (International Fund for Animal Protection), said the ban was urgent due to the inhumane treatment of animals, particularly in Canada.

“Canadian seal hunters catch and kill [pups] under one year old, to be more exact, from 2 weeks to 3 months old,” Vorontsova told the Voice of Russia. “Thus, there’s reason to believe that seal hunting is cruel and inexpedient. Canada keeps saying that 90 percent of the seal skin market is in Russia.”

“And I’m very happy to say that Russia, which banned seal hunting in 2009, made another step and imposed a ban on the import of seal skins. Thus, the Union of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia, which have joined the countries, where a ban on the import of seal skins is in force, has made a very important step,” Vorontsova added.

A ban on the sale of seal products has also been approved by the European Parliament, although there will be exceptions for certain small indigenous communities in Russia, Greenland, Canada and Alaska. European visitors will still be able to purchase souvenirs made from the animal products as long as they are not for resale.

The Jakobshavn Isbrae peak on Greenland’s ice sheet grew rapidly during two different centuries of cooling thousands of years ago, according to the scientists from the University at Buffalo.

Jason Briner, a professor of geology at the university and lead researcher of the Greenland team, said, “When we look at the geologic record, we are finding out that the large rivers of ice that drain ice sheets are extremely sensitive to climate change, both warming and cooling. Probably the larger these rivers of ice are, the more sensitive they are to climate change.”

Briner has been taking teams to the Arctic region for several years, hoping to uncover the history of the remote landscape. On their latest trip, they dated sediment from Jakobshavn Isbrae and its surrounding lake and found a single layer of rock, thought to be around 9,200 years old, set between two layers of plant matter. This discovery implies that the cycle of melting went into retreat for a period.

The scientists identified another stage of advancement around 8,200 years ago by dating boulders in a trail of debris left where the glacier once stood. Although the researchers cannot say how much the ice cap grew by during these times, they claim the fact that it advanced at all during short cooling periods during warming times demonstrates a high sensitivity to climate change.

(Photos: Anders Peter Amsnæs)

Researchers from Ohio State University found that during 2010, part of country’s landmass rose more than half a centimetre more than in recent years.

The data were collected from GPS stations which usually record an average uplift of about a centimetre per year in the Arctic country.

“But a temperature spike in 2010 lifted the bedrock a detectably higher amount over a short five-month period – as high as 20 mm in some locations,” Michael Bevis, an geologist from the POLENET research network told a conference of the American Geophysical Union this week.

He added that the changes must be due to the increased ice loss. “Really, there is no other explanation. The uplift anomaly correlates with maps of the 2010 melting day anomaly. In locations where there were many extra days of melting in 2010, the uplift anomaly is highest,” Bevis said.

For every 100 billion tonnes of loss from the Greenland ice sheet, global sea levels are thought to increase by around 0.25mm. “Pulses of extra melting and uplift imply that we’ll experience pulses of extra sea level rise. The process is not really a steady process,” Bevis said.

(Photo: Anders Peter Amsnæs)

As many as 18 executives from companies including BP, Shell and Statoil were ambushed by a group of suit-clad activists as they made their way to a genuine seminar, which was meant to be hosted by Greenland’s Raw Materials Directorate, at Nordatlantens Brygge in Copenhagen.

The undercover agents waited in the building’s lift for the businessmen before advising them that the meeting had moved to another room – one hired by Greenpeace. According to Politiken, rather than receiving information about how they could become involved in oil and gas exploration in the Arctic region, the group was then subjected to a 15-minute power-point presentation about environmental concerns.

Seemingly more interested in the hot drinks and croissants laid on by their generous hosts, it was not until the end of the presentation that the audience became aware that Greenpeace was calling the shots. The activists thanked the executives and left the building after the meeting, joining their more conspicuous yellow-clad comrades outside.