The world-famous icebergs of Ilulissat, Greenland seem large. Towering up to 60 meters above the water, many are. But they used to be twice that size.
In Ilulissat, Greenland’s third-largest town, the icebergs offshore are bigger than the buildings onshore. Such is their salience that the town’s name simply means “icebergs” in Greenlandic. The dizzyingly sculpted blocks of frozen water, some of which are a quarter of a million years old, emanate from the nearby Jakobshavn Glacier, which plunges dramatically into the Ilulissat Icefjord 60 kilometers upstream. Enough ice calves each year to provide for all of the United States’ annual water usage. This may seem like a lot, but the icebergs are getting smaller. While nearly everyone knows that the Arctic ice cap is shrinking in size, the chunks that fall off the edge of the Greenland ice sheet are diminishing, too.
Ilulissat gained UNESCO World Heritage status in 2004 on account of the glacier’s role in helping scientists to climate change. The designation has helped to attract a growing number of visitors from all over the world to the coastal town, where the country’s first luxury hotel opened in 1970. These days, Ilulissat, whose population is 5,000, draws 60,000 visitors per year – more than anywhere else in Greenland. The runway to the airport is being expanded from 845 meters to 2,200 meters to accommodate jet aircraft, much like the airport in Nuuk.
While Greenland’s national tourism agency invites visitors to experience “climate change ‘ground zero'”, locals don’t need calibrated measurements and complicated models to tell them what they can see with their own eyes. Over a dinner of trout and potato casserole one night, my AirBnB host, Jonas (named changed), a man of about 55, explained to me, “In winter, we used to be able to bike around the icebergs. Now, you can’t.”
Another day, I ran to the fishing village of Oqaatsut (population 30–40) 15 miles away and back (more on my impromptu ultramarathon in another post). Jonas thought I was crazy since I could have just taken a boat. But climate change is crazy, too. He added, “You used to be able to take a taxi to Oqaatsut in winter. Not anymore.”
Size is in the eye of the beholder
To the untrained eye, Ilulissat’s icebergs still look enormous. Onboard a midnight cruise around the ice-choked entrance to the fjord, which was comprised of 10 Filipino tourists and myself, my Danish guide, who had only been working in Ilulissat for a little over a week, said he couldn’t stop taking photos of the icebergs and sending them to his family in Copenhagen. His relatives, he joked, were already tiring of the messages. “But they’ll be here soon, and then they will appreciate it. You have to see the ice with your own eyes,” he admitted.
Photos simply fail to convey the enormity of icebergs up to 60 meters, or 20 stories, tall. While I’d seen icebergs in southern Greenland and Iceland before, I’d never been dwarfed by weathered blocks of blue, white, and even black ice. Squawking seagulls dove from their vertical faces. A grungy spire soared up from its white bed like a spooky, glaciated cathedral. The icy steeple rose so high that I had actually seen it from town the night before. The darker colors come from when the ice scrapes the fjord’s bottom, accumulating sediments in its crevices. At a certain point, melting can cause the iceberg’s center of gravity to change, leading it to flip so that the submerged and sullied portion suddenly rises above the water, showing off its colors for all to see.
Some of the large, sloping icebergs even looked like they could host decent ski runs. (I’d rate them green or blue on the face of it, but double-black in actuality due to the chance of collapse at any given moment). My Danish guide seemed skeptical that anyone had ever skied them, but my Airbnb host said that there were YouTube videos that proved otherwise.
The icebergs get smaller as the fjord spits them out.
Eventually, the icebergs drift out to sea in a process that can take years. The largest icebergs, which rake the silty bottom of the fjord and get stuck, are the slowest to emerge into the open ocean. Their meandering journey is again halted by the sill at the end of the fjord, where they become lodged until they break up into pieces small enough to allow them to resume their slow-motion escape.
Once out to sea, diminished in size but still dangerous to shipping, the icebergs float north into Baffin Bay before ocean currents push them south again towards the Davis Strait and the coast of Newfoundland. It is reputed that history’s most notorious iceberg in history, the one that sank the Titanic in 1912, originated in Ilulissat.
As large as the icebergs seemed to my naive eyes, locals claim they used to be double that height. Both Greenlanders and Western written records from the past 150 years describe massive ice floes at scales now unfathomable. One report from 1890 spoke of icebergs up to 400 feet (121 meters) tall.
While many tourism agencies still claim that Ilulissat’s icebergs are as tall as skyscrapers, it’s a bit of a stretch for two reasons. First, skyscrapers, generally defined as buildings over 100 meters (already outdoing the largest 60-meter-high icebergs of Ilulissat), have been getting taller. The average height of the world’s top 100 tallest buildings was 385 meters in 2018, compared to 285 meters in 2000. Second, Greenland’s icebergs are shrinking. The icy season has shortened, too. A writer named Robert Brown explained in 1873 that the fjords used to be frozen from November to June. Now, they typically begin their thaw in early May.
Ilulissat’s icebergs compared to the tallest skyscrapers in the US. Original skyscraper image by Ali Zifan/ Wikipedia.
Brown claimed that the icebergs, which are always on the brink of overturning, could sometimes take hapless hunters’ lives. Their slight, ceaseless motion, he contended, stirred up nutrients in the water, making them a favored habitat of seals. Kayakers would then try to go after the seals around the ice, but they would sometimes fall victim to shards of ice cascading onto them. Hunters would whisper so as to prevent the reverberations of their voices from disturbing the ice.
Now, rip-roaring motorboats blast by the icebergs without such seeming concern, even though the icebergs still seem just as prone to sudden disintegration. Motorboats, of course, can escape a collapsing iceberg faster than a kayak. But even people on land are threatened by precarious ice. Near the hiking trails radiating outward from Ilulissat, signs onshore warn hikers to keep away from the edge. At any moment, a tsunami could occur if an iceberg were to suddenly overturn and displace millions of gallons of water.
A report from 1875 by famed Swedish-Finnish Arctic geologist and explorer Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld, who would later lead an expedition into the center of the Greenland ice sheet in 1883 with two Sámi guides, described the entrance to the Ilulissat Icefjord. The ice was so abundant that it closed off the fjord to “whale-boats and umiaks, nay, even to kajaks (canoes).” Nordenskiöld added, “The shores of the fjord are therefore uninhabited, and seldom visited.” I suppose he failed to realize, as explained later in this post, that Inuit lived on its shores in the settlement of Sermermiut until roughly 1850.
Today, boats regularly ply the fjord’s mouth and its shores are heavily frequented, if no longer settled. Near the hill on the southern edge of Ilulissat looking over the fjord, a wooden walkway was built across the tundra in 2021 to keep visitors to a specific path and mitigate trampling of the fragile vegetation. On the first day that I followed the footpath, a playful Greenlandic sled dog puppy that seemed to have run off from the nearby dogtown, where thousands of the town’s dogs live, guided some friends and me towards the water’s edge. As the frisky fluffball raced down the planks, looking back at our group every so often while sometimes scurrying under the walkway pnto the sodden tundra, he left a trail of wet miniature pawprints behind him.
Sermermiut: The abandoned settlement next to the ice
The walkway leads down to the fjord and the Sermermiut archaeological site, which sits on its edge. The settlement was abandoned in the middle of the nineteenth century as people ceased trading as much with other Greenlandic settlements and instead exchanged goods with their local Danish trading post. For those in Sermermiut, the colonial outpost was a few kilometers north in Jakobahavn (now Ilulissat). Now, all that remains are about 40 grassy mounds, which disguise former turf houses.
Previously, Sermermiut’s inhabitants lived largely off hunting sea mammals. They hunted the gaping-mouthed Greenland shark, too, whose toxic meat would be fed to their dogs or simply left to rot on the beach. The liver of the ghoulish, long-lived vertebrate, which only reaches sexual maturity at age 150, was sold to Danes at the trading post, who prized its supposed healing properties. A study published in Science in 2016 determined that one of the sharks in their sample could have been born in 1504 – just seven years after John Cabot became the first European since the Norse to ply the coast of North America, 400 years before the Northwest Passage would be sailed, and long before climate change would cause the ice looming high over the slow-swimming sharks to retreat and shrink.
Entering a museum of ice
At the top of the wooden walkway is the Ilulissat Icefjord Centre. The esoteric attraction is located inside a stunning building designed by Danish architectural firm Dorte Mandrup. Inspired by a snowy old alighting on a mountain, the structure’s woody curvature blends seamlessly into the grassy surrounds. (Another Arctic project the firm is undertaking is “The Whale” in Andøya, Norway, scheduled to open in June 2027.) Inside is a museum dedicated to the ice. Although admission was a steep 150 DKK (US$23), I bit the bullet. After all, how often does one encounter a center dedicated to such a niche topic at such a grand scale?
The Icefjord Centre contained illuminating displays on everything from the science of the Greenland ice sheet, which explained how layer upon layer of snow compresses to form ice of all shades of white and blue, to the rich ecosystems offshore. They are brimming with not only iconic species like polar bears and walruses, but also shrimp and crustaceans. One type, parasitic copepods (Ommatokoita elongata), infest the eyes of the Greenland shark, causing it to go blind. It’s not a big deal for the predator, though, for it navigates primarily by using smell, electroreception, and mechanoreception. In Arctic food webs, no stone – or cornea – is left unturned.
Though the museum space itself was relatively compact, there were numerous large-format books on display that served as exhibits, packing in a wealth of information. For someone like myself who admittedly spends more time reading museum signs than appreciating the art or artifact on display, I found myself glued to the books learning about topics like beluga whale hunting techniques and Inuit dress. The only issue with this setup was that once, I had to wait 15 minutes for another bibliophile to finish their deep dive. I had hoped to buy a copy of one of the books in the museum’s boutique, but alas, none were for sale. I did find myself momentarily tempted by a Greenlandic cookbook until pragmatism struck and I realized I wouldn’t be able to source most of the ingredients at home.
Another room contained paintings of ancient ice crystals and live audio feeds from research stations across the Greenland ice sheet, which transmitted the sound of the wind and blowing snow. Even in summer, it sounded harsh out there. But while the amount of snow that falls each year used to balance out the amount of ice that calved off or melted away, since the 1990s, the ice sheet has been losing more mass than can be replaced.
So long as climate change continues to accelerate, there may come a time when even today’s 60-meter-high drift ice seems like the stuff of fantasy. In tomorrow’s water world, young people might scoff at their grandparents, deeming their recollections of “icebergs larger than buildings” to be tall tales. Indeed, quite literally, they are. But the future of ice is likely one of short stories.
