We are sailing back down Sermilik fjord, passing hundreds of icebergs - some of them real giants. By all rights, we should be pretty jaded by now, having spent the past weeks staring at icebergs, glaciers and sea ice, but every now and then you still see something that knocks your socks off.

News of today's prize find spread rapidly through the ship. An iceberg made up of the kind of colors you only see in places like these; colors that are impossible to perfectly describe or reproduce. Even now, 9:30 at night and hours later, we're still arguing about what color you would call this iceberg. Personally, I'd say it was, "a very unusual shade of aquamarine".

Part of the reason icebergs are so fascinating is that each is unique, drifting, and ever changing as they melt. They calve off the glaciers that feed into this fjord, many of which are fed in turn by the Greenland ice sheet. So here you have ice, thousands of years old, making it's way out to sea. Some ice sheet fed glaciers in this part of Greenland are speeding up, and disintegrating, resulting in more ice being dumped into the fjords.

All of this (admittedly very pretty) floating glacier ice does not only add to sea level rise. It also dilutes the ocean, making it less salty - a difference you can taste in the fjord water here. Thermohaline (thermo = heat, haline = salt) ocean currents circulate water from the tropics up the coast of Europe - keeping its winters more mild than otherwise. The fear is that as more fresh water drains into the Arctic Ocean, it will weaken or shut down the "pump" powering this current.

So, in a seeming paradox, global warming could lead to a regional cooling of northern Europe, with major implications for everything from agriculture to summer swimming.

- Andrew