To Greenland, in Search of Icebergs
Our ship was about halfway up the west coast of Greenland when I finally accepted the fact that my glorious expedition was a disaster.
It had not begun well. There were no cabins available, leaving me to spend the voyage in the forward lounge, sitting up in a fixed-back chair.
But the fatal blow came that morning when I saw my first iceberg—the very thing I had journeyed to the Arctic Circle to see up close. This was not up close. The iceberg was off in the distance, an oddly shaped white blip floating on the water. We encountered others during the day, but none closer than 500 yards. I was devastated.
This was supposed to be one of the few places to really appreciate icebergs. Most of the big ice that endangers the North Atlantic shipping lanes—presumably the actual iceberg that sank the Titanic—comes from Greenland’s west coast, from Northeast Bay and, farther north, Melville Bay, and from Disko Bay, toward which we were sailing.
Summer is The Season, when the temperatures are warm enough for glaciers, those vast valleys of ice, to move relentlessly down to the water’s edge. There the pressure of the water’s buoyancy and its warmth work to break off chunks of ice hundreds of feet high. That is how icebergs are formed, and why I came to Greenland.
I asked our captain if we could get closer. His response was to lecture me on the danger, reminding me that icebergs are continually melting, and as they melt their centers of gravity shift.
“When it shifts enough,” he said, “the iceberg rolls over.”
Probably I would have given up at that point had the first mate not taken me aside and told me that in Jakobshavn, on Disko Bay, special arrangements could be made.
I left the ship at Jakobshavn, where special arrangements were indeed easy to make. The following morning I was aboard a small open boat that specialized in taking visitors through the fiord.
Nothing had prepared me for what I saw.
They were gigantic. While the average height above water ranged from 200 to 250 feet, many of the icebergs were 300 and 400 feet high. (Some years before, an iceberg from the glacier at Jakobshavn was measured by helicopter at 630 feet. That is higher than the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City.)
They came in every conceivable shape: tall and pointed; round like sand dunes; high at one end and long and low at the other. Some had big holes through their centers, and others contained pools of blue water.
Their textures were as varied as their shapes. Some were smooth and even, but most had patterns of parallel or intersecting lines, or showed rough veins where the icebergs had broken away from larger pieces of ice.
Most were white like fresh snow, pure and clean. But others were discolored on one side or more by brown glacier flour ground from rock, and in still others, cracks had filled with melted water that, when refrozen, formed veins of clear blue or green.
I asked the skipper if we could get closer to the edge of the ice fiord, where the icebergs actually break off from the edge of the ice sheet; they call it calving. He shook his head sternly. “We are close enough,” he said. His tone convinced me not to push.
That evening, back at the hotel dining room, I sat at my table and looked out over Disko Bay. Although it was 9:30, the sky was bright. The bay glistened with icebergs beginning their odyssey south. The process in summer is endless. Jakobshavn’s glacier moves at between 65 and 100 feet a day, producing on any one of those days as much as 20 million tons of floating ice, or about 14 icebergs.
It was exotic being there on the edge of the mighty glacier, watching the dazzling show before me. The hotel, making a pitch for the new tourist trade, boasted of its French and Danish menu, but I preferred its Greenland specialities. I had tried roast razorbill on my first night; this evening I enjoyed the whale steak with fried onions.
The tranquility of dining was periodically shattered by the sound of thunder. Strange, I thought, on such a clear night. I asked my waiter. He pointed in the direction of the ice fiord. “Ice Bergs,” he said. And holding up his hands, palms together, he let one hand fall away.
I paid the check, went up to change into jeans, boots and a light parka, and headed on foot for the ice fiord.
Within two miles I was out of town, off the road and across a squishy field of tundra, as close to the edge of the glacier as I could get. I had climbed up some rocks, but those remaining between me and the ice were too high, too steep.
Being out there was eerie. I could have been the only person in the world; it was that empty, that quiet. Only the wind made a sound, whistling against the naked peaks of rock. Midnight had come and gone. The sun had finally set, leaving the sky bathed in a purple-gray twilight that would last for the few hours till dawn.
Suddenly it started. First the faint rumble out at the edge of the glacier. Then a loud crack echoing across the sky, the splitting, the ripping asunder of a million tons of ice. The rumble grew to a deafening roar, only to be swallowed by the explosion of the ice crashing into water.
And then it was again silent. It had happened—an iceberg had calved. I saw nothing. But I had witnessed creation.