IMAGES: ALAMY; GETTY
GREENLAND
It’s a drizzly day in Scoresby Sund, and expedition leader Bernabe Urtubey is scouting the base of Sol Glacier when a gigantic cavity wall suddenly breaks away, sending a violent shockwave across the bay.
Ice slams into the brine. An avalanche follows like poured powdered sugar. A wave breaks with the boom of cannon fire. Moving to the safety of more remote waters, we survey the trauma from afar. The glacier growls once again. “Good for the movies, not the environment,”
says Bernabe when asked what he feels about the calving slab. “The glaciers are decaying too fast. It’s a tap that can’t be turned off.” He traces his fingers along the icecap’s grooves and between the two peaks that bookend the ice shelf’s onward rush into the sea. “It’s beautiful, but dangerous and scary at the same time.” Bernabe has been guiding in the polar latitudes
ever since he left Argentinian Patagonia — the marine biologist has seen seas rolling and rising here for two decades now — and he doesn’t pretend east Greenland is without its problems. One of the most inaccessible places on the planet, this part of the Arctic is on the front line of the climate crisis and Bernabe is a first-hand witness to how Scoresby Sund and its labyrinth of fords is changing. Greenland’s ice cap is bigger than the US, yet it’s vanishing 100 times faster than previously calculated, he tells me, and the icebergs that percolate into the ford after being dragged south by the East Greenland Current are more unpredictable — and more monstrous — than ever.
Going with the floe Few landscapes so thoroughly put sailors in their place as Scoresby Sund. Known as ‘Kangertittivaq’ by the Inuits and Bigetey Boo by the Danes, the world’s largest ford system is a maze of inlets and icebergs — sparkling blue in late summer and ghost white in other seasons. It’s a ford with unreliably mapped depth charts, too, and, with the seaway closed to all ships when it freezes over from September to mid-July, fewer than 1,000 visitors make it this far every year. It’s certainly an arrangement that suits the landscape: unlike Greenland’s far busier west coast, this is a truly wild place preserved in pristine condition. It feels as remote as it’s possible to get. A good place, I think, to be an iceberg left to drift. Bernabe had eased me in gently to the extremes
of the landscape on board M/V Sea Spirit, a vessel run by polar operator Poseidon Expeditions. We’d sailed from Reykjavik across the Denmark Strait to get here — more than a day and a half rolling in
18
NATIONALGEOGRAPHIC.COM/TRAVEL
heaving seas. We first anchored in Viking Bay, an iceberg-littered bay where we’d received a warm welcome from the dawn and nature surrounding us. Upon arrival, we’d headed up to the ship’s top deck to absorb the symphony of autumnal colours and fanfare of light. It felt like taking box seats before curtain-up on opening night. The next day, we learn to appreciate the intimate
dance between bergs, floes and glaciers. Out on the water with Bernabe, it’s part education, part quiz, and I’m soon learning to work out an iceberg’s age, and even temperament, from its colour, with the different hues revealing details akin to a lonely- hearts advert, it turns out. Alabaster-white means young and bubbly, I’m told. Sapphire-blue is more mature, but still likes to travel. Black can be impulsive and dangerously flirty with boats. With a bit of imagination, the smallest details
also recast the icebergs as other things altogether. One is all ramparts rising to steeples and soaring turrets like Edinburgh Castle. Another has a gigantic curve and could be Marble Arch. A trick of perspective makes some in the distance seem as large as mountains. Snowdonia, I think, or perhaps Buachaille Etive Mòr in Glencoe. “You’ll be the first to have ever laid eyes on these,” says Bernabe, as he slows the outboard motor for a closer look at the floating gallery of freshly carved ice. “Maybe the last.” This is a landscape-scale freezer on defrost and almost not of this planet. As the days fall into a rhythm of rigid inflatable
boat rides and coastal hikes, I realise a visit to this fragile edge of Greenland combines two incompatible things: seeing top-notch nature and treading on land that encounters few visitors. During a boat cruise in Rypeford, I watch two male musk oxen with bouffant hairdos collide with the impact of a head-on train crash when competing for breeding rights. I hike across empty tundra, yards from a cotton-white Arctic hare, only to scare the daylights out of it and its offspring. While walking along a beach at Sydkap, with hunks of diamond ice hurled against the shore, the silence is broken by the trill of an agitated glaucous gull. “What are you doing here?” seems to be its cry. Other experiences offer glimpses of this almost
secret world. In Hareford, a seal is hunted through the sea ice by a ghostly polar bear I never quite see. The next day I nearly step on a northern collared lemming while picking over a landscape of dwarf
Clockwise from top: Inuit village in Ittoqqortoormiit, Greenland; exploring icebergs aboard a Zodiac in Scoresby Sund; musk oxen grazing on a hill covered with willow and dwarf birch on the east coast in Scoresby Sund Previous pages: An enormous drifting glacier in Scoresby Sund
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148 |
Page 149 |
Page 150 |
Page 151 |
Page 152 |
Page 153 |
Page 154 |
Page 155 |
Page 156 |
Page 157 |
Page 158 |
Page 159 |
Page 160 |
Page 161 |
Page 162 |
Page 163 |
Page 164
