Ben Keene, editor of Oxford Atlas of the World, has decided to make Warming Island (Uunartoq Qeqertotoq) his place of the year. He names a place of the week in his geographical blog at Oxford University Press. Warming Island is especially interesting because it’s now known to be an island.

All over Greenland and the Arctic, rising temperatures are not simply melting ice; they are changing the very geography of coastlines. Nunataks — “lonely mountains” in Inuit — that were encased in the margins of Greenland’s ice sheet are being freed of their age-old bonds, exposing a new chain of islands and a new opportunity for Arctic explorers to write their names on the landscape.

“We are already in a new era of geography,” said the Arctic explorer Will Steger. “This phenomenon — of an island all of a sudden appearing out of nowhere and the ice melting around it — is a real common phenomenon now.”

Read more about Warming here.