Spending 2 winters in Norway I’d taken a keen interest in the way the locals talked about snow and ice.  If English had a paucity of words, Norwegians seemed to draw from a larger lexicon, whilst indigenous Saami possessed a positive panoply of terms.

One reindeer herder confirmed for me what I’d read about there being no word in Saami language for the new type of ice-layered snow that formed after multiple periods of winter rain, creating problems for the lichen-munching reindeer.  Which is, increasingly, the outlook for the Arctic: Greenland and Norwegian Sea areas are predicted to receive more rain than snow by the end of the century.

With this in mind I began asking Greenlandic locals about their different terms for sea ice.  Greenlandic is a very descriptive language, and the names equally so.  Uummannaq, for example, means “heart shaped mountain”.  Other place names might denote flowing streams, proliferation of fish, treacherous currents, etc.  Conversations revealed they had many terms to describe the phenomena I had been observing.  I should not have been surprised, given the view from their living room windows as we spoke.

French scholars Nicole Tersis and Pierre Taverniers have produced a “non-exhaustive” catalogue of over 100 Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic) terms for sea ice.  So I’ve extracted from their invaluable list a dozen words that I fear will become increasingly needed as the century progresses.
(ind = indicative; 3sg = third person singular)

aakkarneq: melted sea ice (by current or weather action).
  /aap-kkar-neq melt-causative- abstract participium/

imarorpoq: sea becomes ice free. Refers to imaq: sea.
  /imaq-ror-poq sea-become-ind.3sg/

puttineq: melting snow area on sea ice.
Water oozes up through the ice, forming a king of slush with the snow on it.

puttippoq: sea ice surface becomes wet (melting snow).
  /pui-tip?-poq rise to surface-cause?-ind.3sg/

qaatersuarpoq: [a person or a dog] falls through sea ice.
  /qaaser-ter-rsuar-poq? be wet-gradually-much-ind.3sg/

sequmissimavoq: fast ice is broken up.
/sequmit-sima-voq break into pieces-perfective-ind.3sg/

sikorluppoq: sea ice is bad (thin and unsafe).
/siku-rlup-poq sea ice-have a bad-ind.3sg/

sikuerpoq: sea ice breaks up and goes away.
  /siku-er-poq ice-remove-ind.3sg/

sikueruppoq: sea is ice-free.
  /siku-erup-poq ice-have no more-ind.3sg/

sikujumaataarpoq: sea ice delays in forming.
/siku-jumaataar-poq form ice-a long time to get-ind.3sg/ 

sikujuippoq: there is no more sea ice.
/siku-juip-poq form ice-never-ind.3sg/

sikutanngueruppoq: there is no ice at all on the sea.
/siku-taq-nguaq-erup-poq ice-piece of-little-have no more-ind.3sg/