The Greenland Ice Cap

After a quick over night anchor at the small fishing village of Christianshab, (complete with hundreds of howling huskies on land) we left this morning around 9:00 A.M. We immediately came into a massively and seemingly endless ice field studded with bergs of indescribable size and beauty. Again, because words simply won’t support any sort of attempt at a description, I’ll upload two small video files for you.

The first shows the leading edge of the ice in Jakobshavn Isfjord coming down the east side of Disko Island. This is an indication that the Greenland Ice Cap is calving at a very healthy rate.  The potential concern for this ice cap is that it wasn’t long ago that the predication of the “Larson B” ice shelf in Antarctica would take decades to melt, but it disappeared in just 30 days. Drastic changes like these can potentially effect global climate overnight. Needless to say, environmental eyes from many differing camps on global warming are watching this ice cap. Because of the heavy concentration of ice and any unexpected wind shift could potentially lock us in, we opted out of going north of the east side of Disko Island and headed straight for the south side.  We’re keeping our fingers crossed that the weather window we saw a few days ago stays open, and we can scoot across Baffin Bay to Lancaster Sound sooner rather than later.

The second video depicts the sheer enormity of these creatures. If you look very closely at the bottom of the video you’ll see our 20’ inflatable with Chauncey, Sefton and Greg driving by about 100 yds off the berg.  It was during this pass that we on Bagan heard what sounded like a canon exploding inside the berg itself.  A piece of ice approximately the same size as the inflatable had fallen down from the top of the arch.  Inflatable and crew were back aboard in record time.

By the way, before we leave Greenland could anyone tell me what “Inissinneqassanngilluinnarput” means? We’ve seen it on a few signs and are hoping that whatever it means we’re in full compliance of.