Arguing that we need to develop a sense of sin when we offend against the natural world, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I led his latest interfaith environmental meeting last week in Greenland where the ice is melting at a ‘phenomenal' rate

All that remains now of Tjodhilde's Church is a small horseshoe-shaped turf rampart, a modest memorial to a 1,000-year-old Christian site. Archaeologists believe the tiny building that stood here, 3.5 yards long and two across, was the first church in North America. It was built around 1000 AD by Tjodhilde, wife of Erik the Red, and last week it marked the end of an extraordinary twenty-first century Greenland odyssey.

It was the place chosen for the service celebrated by the Ecumenical Patriarch, Bartholomew I, titular leader of 250 Orthodox Christians, to conclude a week's intensive focus on the High North and what it portends for the rest of us. Standing with a Lutheran bishop in a bowl of green hills above the fjord, the patriarch brought to a formal end a symposium under the title "The Arctic: Mirror of Life", which had taken religious leaders, scientists and journalists 750 miles along Greenland's west coast.

The voyage had begun far to the north, at the town of Ilulissat. It is a Unesco World Heritage Site and the place where one of Greenland's fastest-flowing glaciers finally reaches the sea. A few years ago the Sermeq Kujalleq glacier, thought to be the origin of the iceberg which sank the Titanic in 1912, was moving at several kilometres a year. By 2003 that had increased to 8kms, and it is now flowing at 15kms annually, nearly two metres an hour.

So Ilulissat was an obvious choice to start a week that focused on the accelerating rate of climate change. Standing in the bows of the Fram, the brand-new Norwegian cruise ship which hosted the symposium, the patriarch led a silent prayer for the planet. He was joined by the Pope's representative, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, Archbishop emeritus of Washington, and by other leaders of Christian Churches, Judaism and Islam, and by Hindu, Shinto and Zen Buddhist leaders.

As the Fram stayed a respectful distance from the jumble of icebergs drifting slowly out to sea from the face of the glacier, the group stood united in reflection under a grey sky with scarcely an overcoat between them. The day was not cold. Greenland and the rest of the Arctic are warming fast.

The patriarch said he had prayed "for the planet and for the Earth, for salvation of life and heart, for the coming generation, and for Creation". Cardinal McCarrick told me that climate change was "an utmost priority", and that the symposium reminded the faithful of all religions that they had the opportunity to put pressure on legislators. "It's my hope that in the US this message will be seen and heard by all those we've chosen to lead us," he said.

Sofie Petersen, the 51-year-old Lutheran Bishop of Greenland, said the change in the climate locally had become apparent: "The sun is much hotter now. It burns very strongly and hurts your skin. When I was a child I could stay outside much longer. There's been a big change in the last 10 years."

The 67-year-old Bartholomew, elected in 1991 as leader of the 250 million-strong worldwide Orthodox community, is a Turkish citizen though ethnically of Greek descent. His commitment to the environment has been evident from early in his patriarchate - some observers believe it shows the influence of his predecessor, Demetrios I - and Bartholomew has signed joint declarations on the environment with the late Pope John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

Within three years of his election, he had organised the first of a series of international environmental seminars, and 1995 saw the first of his ship-borne symposia. That year it was held in the Aegean, marking the 1,900th anniversary of the Book of Revelation. It drew up the seven Patmos Principles, intended as steps for action: notably, one of them argues that we need to develop a sense of sin when we offend against the Earth and the natural world.

In his opening address to this year's symposium, the patriarch himself verged on the apocalyptic. He began with a warning that "the danger of an avoidable environmental catastrophe is now more acute than ever". All was not yet lost, he said: "Neither our scientific friends nor our fellow leaders of the world of faith would have come to Greenland if we thought the future of the planet was utterly hopeless."

But his conclusion was stark: "Senior figures from many religious traditions have offered up, each in his own way, a silent prayer for the future of our beautiful world, for the people who live on Earth now, and for the generations that will succeed us, assuming that human folly does not destroy life on earth altogether."

Yet the symposium managed often to be a source of hope, when religious demarcation lines seemed unimportant and faith and science could recognise how much they share. At Cardinal McCarrick's simple Mass on board the Fram, the lessons were read by a Lutheran bishop and an Orthodox deacon, and the Greenlandic choir included a leading geologist.

Most of Greenland is covered in ice, in places several miles thick. If you look at an atlas you will find huge swathes of white space marked simply "Area Unexplored". But scientists are steadily unpacking the ice cap's secrets. Professor Robert Corell chairs the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, the definitive study of what is happening in the region. He describes the rate of melting on the ice cap as "just phenomenal".

As the growing warmth of the air melts more of the ice, the water has to go somewhere. Until recently glaciologists had thought it simply trickled down to the sea. But they have now found that much of it pours down through cracks in the ice to form a slippery and unstable layer above the bedrock.

"It's as if we're applying oil to the bottom of the glacier," says Dr Corell. "We can now see down to the base of the ice cap by radar, and at one spot there's 500 metres of water sitting under the ice. It's massive, it's accelerating, and it could be catastrophic, triggering an abrupt change.

"And abrupt events do happen. We filmed one piece of ice moving five kilometres in 90 minutes. It's the rate of change that matters more than the actual numbers. We're adding fresh water to the ocean far faster than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted earlier this year. We're looking at a sea-level rise by 2100 not of up to 60cms, the IPCC figure, but at the best part of a metre - and some estimates are double that."

Terry Callaghan is professor of Arctic ecology at the universities of Sheffield and Lund in Sweden. He echoes Dr Corell's warning: "The overall message is that we're seeing very big changes in Arctic biological systems, some of them sudden. We're more worried about these step changes than about the ones we can predict. Forests are replacing the tundra. That's good news in the sense that the trees will soak up carbon dioxide. But it means a huge change in albedo, or reflectivity: dark trees will absorb heat instead of reflecting it back into space as ice and snow would. So it will mean a net warming."

Greenland used to be part of Denmark. "Before home rule there was huge Danish paternalism," says Minik Rosing, a Greenlander who is professor of geology at the University of Copenhagen. "Until the Second World War Greenlanders were not even allowed to own a kerosene lamp."

Now there are different problems. You can reach coastal communities by boat, or - if you can afford it - by helicopter, though most of those are booked solid during the summer months by diamond prospectors. But for most people the only way to get around is by dog sled. And neither dogs nor sleds can cope with warmer weather and thinning ice.

There are more fundamental changes afoot, caused not by climate but by the winds and ocean currents, which carry pollutants up from Europe, Asia and North America. Two Scandinavian scientists say twice as many girls are being born as boys across much of the Arctic, and they suspect pollution is to blame.

Dr Lars-Otto Reiersen, who heads the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme, and Dr Jens Hansen, director of the Centre of Arctic Environmental Medicine at the Danish University of Aarhus, examined mothers and children in five Russian regions. They analysed the amount of PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls, known to cause cancer in animals and to affect their nervous, reproductive and immune systems) that the women had ingested. In Russia, they say, high PCB levels are definitely to blame for skewed sex ratios, and they suspect this is true in Greenland and Canada as well.

In one area, Dr Reiersen said, "when the mother had an average of 2-4 micrograms of PCBs or more per litre of blood, we found she bore on average two girls for every boy." Many male infants were sickly or weighed less than normal. PCB levels are 10 times higher in parts of Greenland than in Russia. The pollutants accumulate as they pass up the food chain. Some are endocrine disrupters, chemicals that mimic sex hormones.

Aqqaluk Lynge, president of the Inuit Circumpolar Council and himself a Greenlander, said: "This is a disaster, especially for some 1,500 people who make up the Inuit nations in the far north-east of Russia. In the north of Greenland, near the Thule American airbase, only girl babies are being born to Inuit families. This has become a critical question of people's survival, but few governments want to talk about the problem of hormone mimickers, because it means thinking about the chemicals you use."

People living on the coast are at particular risk because the pollution builds up in the blubber of the seals and whales that many Inuit eat. Pregnant women are being advised to avoid this traditional diet, although obesity is a growing problem in Greenland because of increasing reliance on imported foods such as chips and Cola.

As the Fram sailed the last few miles before its passengers disembarked, the patriarch gave his final address. He said, "If there is one single message, it is this: time is short. Humanity does not have the luxury of quarrelling over racial or economic or political matters. May God grant us the wisdom to act in time."

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