My Trips

Greenland, July 18-20

The huge iceberg finally freed itself from the Illulissat Icefjord and entered Disko Bay.  I think of it happening on bright sparkling morning, filled with the particular sunlight found above the Arctic Circle, twinkling off the grey green waters, but I really don’t have any way of knowing.  Maybe for the purpose of this story it should be a somber, foreboding day filled with low clouds and high winds. 

This iceberg began as part of the Greenland Ice Sheet and flowed 40 miles down the Jakobshavn Glacier.  Moving at about 46 meters a day, it’s the fastest flowing glacier in Greenland and the most productive in the Northern Hemisphere. Even at that speed, it takes nearly 4 years to reach the end of the glacier and the beginning of the icefjord.  Reaching the glacier face and calving, its journey had only begun.  The Illulissat Icefjord is about 34 miles long, as much as 3 ¾ miles wide, and clogged with ice piled on top of ice.  It’s a mixture of huge ice bergs and smaller chunks all comprising a huge traffic jam called an ice mélange.  Some of the bergs are so large they become grounded on the bottom and will be stuck indefinitely. To the naked eye the fjord is a huge jumble that appears solid and doesn’t look to be moving at all.

Slowly but inexorably, our iceberg broke free of its neighbors and floated for the first time through the ice-choked harbor of the village of Illulissat. It drifted past Disko Island and into the Davis Strait, which separates western Greenland from Baffin Island.  In the Strait, it was grabbed by the West Greenland Current and turned north following the coast.  About three-quarters of the way up Greenland, the land turns westward into Baffin Bay.  The berg followed the westward movement toward the mouth of Lancaster Sound, where it was grabbed by the Baffin Current, and what started as a march northward now became a southward journey along the shores of Baffin Island.  The Baffin Island Current leads to the Labrador Current, continuing the southward push until our iceberg passed through the Labrador Sea and into the North Atlantic.

To survive that journey it had to be a large iceberg.  To survive it and remain a large iceberg at the end, it had to be huge at the start.  This is not unusual.  Many make this journey.  However, this particular iceberg was special, for it was drifting in the North Atlantic on the night of April 14, 1912 where it had a meeting with an unsinkable ship on its maiden voyage.  It instantly become the most famous iceberg in the history of the world.

We entered Disko Bay on a bright sparkling morning, with the Arctic sun sparkling on the water.  We were there to see this UNESCO World Heritage Site and to visit the village of Illulissat.  The harbor was choked with ice, as it had been in the early 1900’s and for millennia before that.  The ship got in as close to the harbor as it could and then we negotiated the rest of the trip via zodiac.

This was our second landfall in Greenland, having set foot in the village of Sissimiut the day before.  Both excursions were our introduction to life above the Arctic Circle and to the modern Inuit way of life.  Both villages are very large by Arctic standards, with populations in the low thousands.  Both rely principally on fishing, hunting and some tourism.  Food in grocery stores here is enormously expensive. This time of year there is little nearby snow so there are snowmobiles, dogsleds and boats pulled up on dry hills and gravel roads.  Most transportation is by ATV and school busses.  The often brightly colored houses were small and mostly on stilts to be able to build above the permafrost.  They didn’t look very well insulated.  In many yards, sled dogs were chained up.  We were repeatedly warned not to approach or talk to the dogs.  These are working dogs, not pets, and might take exception to anyone getting too close.  There were also dog yards dotting some hills, full of doghouses and their inhabitants chained nearby.

In Sissimiut, we walked through town with local guides.  There was an excellent museum, many yards with boats and caribou antlers, and a few shops. We spotted a house with three narwhal tusks displayed in the front window.  The famous mosquitoes were around and would swarm, but were surprisingly unaggressive.

Illulissat is home to the new Isfjordcenter Museum.  After a bus ride though the village and to the top of a hill, the museum sits on a promontory overlooking the mouth of the icefjord.  An angular building with huge glass windows, it blends beautifully into the landscape.  It’s worth the trip here just to see the building.  The museum also sits at the beginning of a boardwalk that wanders through meadows of tundra flora, past the site of an ancient Thule settlement and onto a ridge looking up the fjord toward the glacier.  For all appearances, it resembles solid, immobile ice.  I think you’d have to sit there for the better part of a day to realize any movement. The views were spectacular.  Rather than returning by the boardwalk, we continued along a trail up and down the rocky shore, following the fjord inland for a relatively short distance, before climbing over a ridge and looping back to the museum.  The museum blends so perfectly into the terrain that I noticed the boardwalk as we came off the ridge first before realizing the museum was in plain sight right in front of me.

Later in the day we took to small local boats and wandered among the frozen giants in the harbor. The fjord empties 35 billion tons of ice into these waters each year.  Waterfalls cascaded off of some, birds used them for resting places and a handful of humpback whales cruised along the face of the bergs, trying to trap prey against the underwater side.  Our first whale sightings!

As we sailed away from Disko Bay, we passed a 2500+ passenger cruise ship, sitting well out from the harbor, belching steam.  It could not get any closer.  Its tenders could not get passengers to shore through the ice and around the bergs.  We saw many passengers lining the top deck, next to the huge swimming pool and giant video screens, looking jealously (we hoped) and helplessly on as we serenely passed by.  This ship was not rated nor had permits for these conditions.  Another testament to man’s unrelenting hubris.  Apparently little has been learned in 110 years.  We could well image the huge icebergs sitting in Disko Bay eagerly eyeing this sitting duck.

Now it’s on to the Davis Strait and Baffin Island.