Greenland

The gargantuan chunks of ice breaking off the Sermeq Kujalleq glacier and thundering into an Arctic fjord make a spectacular sight. But to Greenlanders, the scene also is deeply worrisome. The frequency and size of the icefalls are a powerful reminder that the frozen sheet covering the world's largest island is thinning -- a glaring sign of global warming, scientists say.

"The BONES" is a snapshot of the point at which the careers and destinies of two very different men intersect, collide and explode. Frank Bones, an outlaw comedian with a serious substance-abuse problem whose last chance at success is a sitcom in which he is to play an Eskimo, is clearly on the way down. And Lloyd Melnick, a television writer with a 10-figure development deal and a big new house in Brentwood, is on the way up.

Terra incognita is no more. Assumptions about faraway places are easy and plausible in this shrinking, digital world. From a book or a photograph, we can construe the habits of a people; from a movie or a download, we consider them neighbors. Yet as the plane rose above the fog that midsummer morning, flying northeast into the sun, I had no notion of what lay ahead.

On a recent morning, Seth Greenland sits in his Santa Monica office wearing black jeans and a gray pullover, trying to keep his sense of balance intact. Outwardly calm, soft-spoken even, the 49-year-old is, by his own admission, that rarest of human specimens: a writer on the verge of getting what he wants. For more than two decades, Greenland has toiled in the trenches of the entertainment industry, doing everything from writing gags for stand-ups to working on sitcoms such as "a.k.a.

Parents who travel with children often say that in some of the most exotic, faraway places they are befriended, even welcomed, into people's homes because they have their little ones in tow. In the early '70s, 10-month-old Kari Herbert served as just such an icebreaker for her mother and father in an Inuit hunting village on a remote, icebound islet off the northwest coast of Greenland, 860 miles south of the North Pole.

On a remote beach north of Santa Barbara it's the end of a perfect winter day: A bright blue sky darkens as the orange orb of the sun plunges into the mirror-like ocean. In the distance, two figures approach, seeming to emerge out of the landscape itself: a woman and a dog. The animal is a stubby Australian cattle dog, a squat thing, close to the earth. The woman is Gretel Ehrlich, herself elemental -- long, blond-cum-gray hair; sharp, bright eyes; a face as weathered as driftwood.

To escape the summer heat, my 14-year-old son, Edward, and I went north last year -- far north, by small cruise ship, to a high Arctic latitude. It proved to be the coolest vacation imaginable. Indeed, gales and 4-foot snowdrifts from an Arctic blizzard delayed our charter plane's departure for nearly a day. At last we left Ottawa for Nanisivik, near the northern tip of Canada's Baffin Island, where the 110-passenger ship Akademik Ioffe awaited us.

Greenland's huge ice sheet could melt within the next 1,000 years and swamp low-lying areas around the globe if emissions of carbon dioxide and global warming are not reduced, scientists said Wednesday. A meltdown of the massive ice sheet, which is more than 1.8 miles thick, would raise sea levels by an average 21 feet, threatening countries such as Bangladesh, islands in the Pacific and parts of Florida.

Pitching a makeshift tent on the sea ice, where the Arctic Ocean meets the North Atlantic, brothers Mamarut and Gedion Kristiansen are ready to savor their favorite meal. Nearby lies the carcass of a narwhal, a reclusive beast with an ivory tusk like a unicorn's. Mamarut slices off a piece of muktuk, the whale's raw pink blubber and mottled gray skin, as a snack. "Peqqinnartoq," he says in Greenlandic. Healthy food. Mamarut's wife, Tukummeq Peary, a descendant of famed North Pole explorer Adm.

Denmark acted within its legal rights when it removed native Greenlanders from their ancestral land to expand the U.S. air base at Thule in 1953, the Danish Supreme Court ruled. The government moved 132 people from the Uummannaq settlement to 75 miles north. The plaintiffs sought $38 million in compensation. But the court let stand the total compensation of $80,645 awarded in 1999.