There is something particularly special about paddling a sea kayak amongst icebergs. They transform an otherwise familiar seascape into something completely different. The water is moving, the kayak is moving and, importantly, the ice is moving as well. Every piece has a different shape, a different colour and its own story of how it broke away from the Greenland Ice Sheet and eventually found its way towards the sea.
Our paddle in Kangerlussuaq Fjord gave us exactly that experience. The sea was quite choppy, but fortunately we had the wind behind us, giving us a lovely following run through the fjord. Small icebergs were scattered around the edge of the water and we were able to paddle amongst them, giving us that wonderful sea-level perspective where even a relatively modest lump of floating ice suddenly looks enormous.
Earlier, from the expedition ship, we had already been treated to another memorable Arctic sight when a humpback whale breached from the water. Now, sitting barely a metre above the surface in our kayaks, the experience was completely different. Little Auks flew around us and the mountains rose from the fjord, while brilliant pieces of ice punctuated the dark water.
There was one much larger iceberg farther out in the bay, and that was one we deliberately avoided. It is tempting when kayaking around icebergs to think that the objective is to get as close as possible, but large icebergs demand considerable respect. What you see above the surface is only part of the ice, and an iceberg that changes its balance can roll suddenly. If a substantial berg rolls, collapses or calves, it can create a surprisingly large wave.
So we admired the big one from a sensible distance and concentrated on exploring the smaller pieces of ice around the margins of the fjord. That combination of excitement and caution is part of what makes paddling amongst icebergs such a memorable experience. The ice is beautiful, but it is not scenery in the conventional sense. It is dynamic. It can fracture, roll and move with wind and current. A sea kayaker therefore needs to constantly read not just the water and weather, but the ice itself.
Up close, every iceberg is different. Some are brilliant white, while others reveal intense bands and patches of blue where highly compressed ice absorbs much of the visible light and allows more blue wavelengths to return to our eyes. Some pieces are smooth and sculpted, while others are fractured into extraordinary shapes. At water level you can see undercut sections, cracks and shelves that are almost invisible from the deck of a larger ship.
The really remarkable thing is to remember where all this ice has come from. Kangerlussuaq Fjord cuts deep into Greenland’s west coast and forms part of an extraordinary geographical transition between the Davis Strait and the great ice sheet covering Greenland’s interior. The fjord stretches for roughly 170 kilometres inland, creating a natural corridor from the maritime environment of the coast towards a much drier and increasingly continental Arctic landscape.
At its eastern end lies the settlement of Kangerlussuaq, and beyond it is one of the greatest geographical features on Earth: the Greenland Ice Sheet. Covering around 80 per cent of Greenland, the ice sheet extends for more than 2,000 kilometres from north to south and is more than three kilometres thick in places. That gives the little pieces of ice around the kayak a completely different significance. They are fragments from an ice-dominated landscape of almost unimaginable scale.
The fjord itself is also a product of ice. During repeated glacial periods, enormous masses of moving ice travelled from Greenland’s interior towards the coast. Glaciers exploited valleys and weaknesses in the underlying landscape, while rocks frozen into the base of the moving ice scraped and ground against the bedrock.
Over immense periods of time the valleys became deeper and wider, while huge quantities of eroded rock were carried towards the coast. As the climate warmed and glaciers retreated, the sea flooded into the glacially carved landscape and helped create the fjord we were now paddling through.
Evidence of that glacial history was visible when we went ashore as well. Around the shoreline were glacial erratics: rocks transported by moving ice and eventually deposited as the glaciers retreated. Some may have travelled considerable distances from the bedrock from which they originally came. I always find erratics fascinating because they make the movement of glaciers so tangible. A landscape can appear completely static today, but a large boulder sitting in an apparently illogical position may be evidence that enormous quantities of ice once flowed across that exact spot.
The process has not stopped. Meltwater still flows from the Greenland Ice Sheet, carrying vast quantities of fine sediment produced as moving ice grinds the rock beneath it. This glacial flour can give meltwater and parts of the fjord a cloudy or silty appearance. In a very literal sense, some of what is being carried towards the sea is powdered Greenland.
Kangerlussuaq is particularly interesting because travelling along the fjord takes you through a remarkable environmental transition. At the western end, the landscape is strongly influenced by the sea. Travel east and that maritime influence gradually diminishes. Conditions become drier and increasingly continental as you approach the interior and the Greenland Ice Sheet.
This variation influences everything from vegetation to wildlife. Reindeer – or caribou – inhabit the tundra, while muskoxen are one of the characteristic large mammals of the Kangerlussuaq region. Arctic char use rivers and lakes, and seabirds exploit the productive marine environment towards the coast. Out on the water during our paddle, the Little Auks provided a wonderful connection between these environments. These tiny Arctic seabirds spend much of their lives at sea and look almost impossibly small against the scale of Greenland’s mountains, fjords and ice. The wider landscape has another story that is just as important as the geology. Kangerlussuaq is not an empty Arctic wilderness. People have been moving through this region for thousands of years.
The wider area forms part of the Aasivissuit–Nipisat cultural landscape, stretching between the sea and the ice sheet. Archaeological evidence records around 4,200 years of human history here, with successive Arctic cultures moving seasonally through the landscape to exploit different resources. The coast provided fish and marine mammals. The interior offered caribou. Rivers provided Arctic char. Routes between them connected coast, fjord, tundra and ice. That extraordinary relationship between people and landscape is now recognised through the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Aasivissuit–Nipisat, described as an Inuit hunting ground between ice and sea. It preserves not simply individual archaeological sites but an entire cultural landscape shaped by thousands of years of movement, hunting and adaptation.
For me, there is something particularly appropriate about experiencing part of this Greenlandic landscape from a kayak. The kayak – qajaq in Greenlandic – was developed by Inuit and other Arctic peoples as an extraordinarily efficient hunting craft. Traditional Greenlandic qajaqs were light, narrow and manoeuvrable, allowing hunters to travel quietly through cold coastal waters in search of seals and other marine animals. The paddler effectively became part of the boat. Clothing could be secured around the cockpit, helping prevent freezing water entering, while the ability to roll a capsized qajaq was not a recreational skill but a potentially life-saving one.
From the expedition ship, an iceberg is something you look across at. From a kayak, you look up at it. Even small bergs acquire scale and texture. You notice the water washing against the ice, the shapes cut into its surface and the almost luminous blues hidden within it. You also become much more aware that the iceberg is part of the sea rather than simply sitting upon it. Wind pushes it. Current moves it. Waves work against its edges. Melting changes its shape and centre of gravity. Eventually it may become unstable and roll, exposing a completely different surface that had previously been hidden beneath the water. That was why the large iceberg farther out in the bay deserved plenty of space. There is no photograph worth getting underneath a rolling iceberg.
Greenland’s ice also carries a much larger modern story. The Greenland Ice Sheet covers approximately 1.7 million square kilometres and stores an extraordinary volume of frozen water. Unlike floating sea ice, loss of land-based ice contributes directly to global sea-level rise. Greenland is therefore one of the most important places on Earth for understanding climate change. The ice sheet is losing mass, glaciers are changing and retreating, and patterns of melting are altering as the Arctic warms.
The Greenland Ice Sheet contains enough ice to raise global sea levels by roughly seven metres if it were ever to melt completely. That is not something expected to happen suddenly, but the figure demonstrates the extraordinary quantity of water stored above us on the Greenland landmass. What happens to Greenland consequently matters far beyond Greenland. Yet during our paddle, those global issues temporarily became much simpler and more immediate. We had a following wind, choppy water and icebergs around the kayaks. Little Auks flew past and the Greenlandic mountains surrounded the fjord.
The paddle also brought together so many of the things that make travelling through Greenland fascinating. We were paddling a modern descendant of an Inuit Arctic hunting craft, through a fjord carved by glaciers, past rocks transported by ancient ice and amongst fragments of ice ultimately connected to one of the largest ice masses on the planet.
Why not take the opportunity to read our other blogs about Greenland;
- Nuuk: A Capital City at the Edge of the Wilderness
- Top 5 Things to Do in Nuuk in Summer
- Paddling Maniitsoq and Sermillinguaq Fjord: From Scotland to the Ice
- Sisimiut: Where Modern Greenland Meets the Mountains
- Top 5 Things to Do in Sisimiut in Summer
- Ilulissat: Where Greenland’s Ice Sheet Meets the Sea
- Top 5 Things to Do in Ilulissat in Summer
- Greenland’s Qajaq: The Arctic Hunting Craft That Shaped Sea Kayaking Worldwide