nunatak

A nunatak is a summit or ridge of bedrock that protrudes above the surface of a surrounding glacier or ice sheet, entirely enclosed by ice. The word derives from Greenlandic Inuktitut nunataq, from nuna (land, earth) and the suffix -taq (small or diminished form, roughly 'little piece of'). A nunatak is thus, etymologically, 'a little piece of land' — which captures the subjective experience of standing on one perfectly: an isolated scrap of the world above an otherwise total surface of ice. Nunataks occur wherever an ice sheet has grown to cover everything except the highest terrain — in Greenland, Antarctica, and the great ice sheets of the Last Glacial Maximum that covered much of North America and northern Europe.

The ecological significance of nunataks is disproportionate to their size. During glacial maxima — periods when ice sheets expanded to cover vast regions — nunataks were among the only places where terrestrial life could persist above the ice: refugia for plants, insects, and small animals that would otherwise have been eliminated from regions covered by glaciers. Biogeographers study nunatak refugia to understand how species survived the ice ages and recolonized territory as glaciers retreated. The genetic signatures of nunatak populations — isolated for thousands of years on their rocky islands above the ice — differ measurably from the same species in non-glaciated regions, providing evidence of where life held on during ice ages.

The word entered scientific English through the work of 19th-century European geologists and glaciologists who worked in Greenland and adopted Inuit terminology for features of the ice landscape that their own vocabulary did not cover. The Danish geologist Hinrich Johannes Rink, who spent years in Greenland in the mid-19th century studying the ice sheet and documenting Inuit culture simultaneously, was instrumental in introducing Greenlandic Inuktitut terms into the scientific literature. 'Nunatak' appears in English-language geology publications from the 1870s onward. By the early 20th century, as Antarctic exploration added new populations of the features, the term was firmly established in international glaciology.

Nunataks are now a standard term in glaciology, physical geography, and climate science, used for identical features in Greenland, Antarctica, Svalbard, Iceland, the Andes, and the Himalayas. The word is used without quotation marks or explanatory glosses in scientific papers across all languages that discuss glaciology — a sign that it has completed the borrowing process and is now a term of art rather than a borrowed foreign word. As climate change accelerates glacial retreat worldwide, nunataks are being uncovered in regions where they were buried under ice for thousands of years, making the word appear more frequently in media coverage of climate: the land emerging from ice receding. The little pieces of land are getting bigger.