When I ran 45 kilometers to and from Ilulissat to Oqaatsut, the tundra crunched underfoot. That’s because the iceberg city’s runway expansion is covering the tundra in dust.
The Greenlandic tundra disintegrated beneath my feet. As I ran north from Ilulissat on a sunny June morning, my shoes kicked up a cloud of dust behind me, the lifeless detritus of 1.7 billion year-old rocks. Where springy green moss and little pink flowers once grew now lay gray grit.
To my right, jagged boulders lined a makeshift road leading to a quarry at the top of the hill. Their shapes were the work of manmade explosions rather than the slow, sinuous sculpting of glaciers. The earth was being turned inside out so that Greenland could wrestle an airport from its innards. As the infrastructure rose up into the sky, it was beginning to block the icebergs that lingered in Disko Bay, replacing horizons of blue and white with concrete and steel.
I was running across the dust-strewn tundra from Ilulissat, the Greenlandic city of 5,000 people that lures travelers from around the world to see its enormous, UNESCO World Heritage-listed icebergs, to Oqaatsut, a fishing village home to under 40 people. The journey there and back would span 30 miles. Usually, people hike one way and take a boat in the other direction, but as I was training for a 50-mile race, I thought running the whole distance would make for a good lark.
The route would also allow me to glimpse the massive construction upending the land outside Ilulissat to transform the city’s airport, whose 950-meter runway can only accommodate propeller planes, into a facility tailor-made for bigger jets.
Built with help from the European Union’s Structural and Cohesion Funds, Ilulissat Airport first opened in 1984, just north of the city. Previously, air travel was only possible by helicopter across short distances. The opening of the airport, with its modest runway, made it possible to fly from Ilulissat to the capital, Nuuk, a little over 500 miles to the south.
Now, the Government of Greenland dreams of connecting Ilulissat to the world by air. Currently, the airport features a little cafe serving plastic-wrapped pastries and hot dogs, a baggage carousel, and a cramped but cozy waiting area where at times, it can be hard to find a seat. Despite – or perhaps because of – the lack of space, during the two occasions on which I passed through the airport, it felt joyous and buzzy, full of locals catching up over coffee or showing off their new babies before their flights, Filipino bus drivers calling for incoming visitors to deliver them to their hotels, and outgoing tourists trading tales about the icebergs they glimpsed.
The current terminal at Ilulissat Airport, where locals and tourists wait side by side.
To usher Ilulissat Airport into the era of global travel, a new terminal and 2200-meter runway (the same length as the runway in Nuuk, whose redeveloped airport opened last summer) are being built. Narrow-body aircraft will be able to land on the extended runway. Larger, wide-body aircraft like the Boeing 777 or Airbus A-350, however, typically require runways of at least 3,000 meters.
Once the renovations are completed, Ilulissat and its famous ice fjord will become far more accessible to global tourism (barring geopolitical convulsions – a massive caveat). If everything goes according to plan, the airport will open in 2026.
For now, air travelers must come prop plane from elsewhere in Greenland or, in summer, directly from Reykjavik on an Icelandair Dash 8. This type of plane can carry about 40 passengers – basically, the entire population of Oqaatsut.
That latter route was how I would leave Ilulissat a few days later. On a single Icelandair ticket, I flew from Ilulissat through Keflavik, Iceland to Berlin in what was originally scheduled to be only eight hours. (A flight schedule change meant that I ended up with seven hours to kill walking around the town of Keflavik). According to Visit Greenland, only about 3,100 foreign air passengers departed Greenland this way in 2023.
Once planes like the Boeing 737 Max, which United uses to fly between New York and Nuuk, start serving Ilulissat, that statistic will skyrocket. Each 737 Max can carry 166 passengers, or more than four times as many as a Dash 8.
The controversy surrounding the reconfiguration of Greenland’s air transport network
Ilulissat’s airport renovations are part of a wider push by the Government of Greenland to diversify the economy away from fishing and shrimping and to grow tourism. But the reconfiguration of the country’s airport is controversial for several reasons.
First, the country’s main hub for air traffic has been moved from the small settlement of Kangerlussuaq, whose original runway was built by US military planners in the 1950s. They chose the site because it lay relatively far up a long fjord, pushing it farther from the ocean – and fog – than any other settlement in Greenland. In contrast, flights in and out of seaside Nuuk are regularly canceled due to poor conditions. When I was in Copenhagen just two days ago, for instance, I saw that the outbound flight to Nuuk had been cancelled.
Second, the changes to Greenland’s air transport network prioritize international rather than local connectivity. The airport in Narsarsuaq, a settlement of about 130 people where I was once stranded in for three days due to weather, stands to be downgraded to a heliport.
The airport in Kulusuk, a tiny town on an island on Greenland’s remote east coast, also faces downgrades. The facility was first built in 1956 by the US military to support the Distant Early Warning Line, a network of radar stations aimed at detecting Soviet bombers and missiles. Now, the Cold War-era airport may be replaced by a new, larger airport in the more populated town of Tasillaq on the mainland. While Tasillaq’s 1,800 residents would benefit, Kulusuk’s inhabitants would be cut off from easy air travel. Many of the island’s jobs would disappear, too.
Third, Greenland’s airports – long places where a resident might hang out over coffee and cafe just to see who’s passing through – are becoming unrecognizable, at least in Nuuk and Ilulissat. No longer unfussy spaces that foster community, they are becoming “non-places,” to use the late French anthropologist Marc Augé’s term: the type of transient space where an international traveler may feel at home dragging their roller bag through the duty free section, but where a local may feel, quite literally, out of place.
The decision to alter Greenland’s airports is not an easy one for the country’s government as it tries to balance serving its people with welcoming the world. The slogan, “Greenland is open for business but not for sale,” after all, only rings true if global capital can easily reach it.
Running from the airport to a fishing village
Dust from the runway expansion project chokes the tundra around Ilulissat Airport.
The less discussed toll of airport redevelopment is its sheer environmental impact. That’s what I experienced firsthand as I coursed through the giant, open-air construction site in Ilulissat, one so big you can see it extend across the tundra from space.
In its “Sustainability Summary,” the Nordic Investment Bank, which lent 450 million DKK (€63 million) to Kalaallit Airports International A/S, the part Greenlandic, part Danish-owned operator of Greenland’s airports, admits numerous impacts from construction. These include “noise and vibrations during blasting and hauling of rock material, air emissions from construction equipment and blasting, impacts on flora and fauna due to the removal of overburden and noise, handling of construction waste and explosives.”
The bank adds, “The project will result in an immediate decrease of CO2 annually because domestic travel will decrease,” though it is hard to read that without feeling skeptical.
I tried to follow the trail, which was marked by rock cairns and orange blazes, but it disappeared around the airport. At one point, the only way forward was to duck under a chain link fence and start running along the temporary gravel road that the trucks were using.
Even when I finally had scrambled over enough boulders and crested enough hills that I could no longer see the incipient runway, I could still hear all of the trucks and drills running roughshod over the soft earth. I had to run at least five kilometers further before the ruckus faded. Never before have I felt such relief upon hearing a mosquito buzz.
As I plodded towards Oqaatsut, finally, the tundra came alive. My feet squished into the sodden moss, one after the other – the only real task of ultramarathon training. Birds squawked overhead. A few men walked outside their cabin on the shore as icebergs drifted lazily offshore. I nibbled on a sugar-crusted Belgian waffle while watching their languid tango.
Gradually, the sky darkened and an icy wind blew from the east off the frosty recesses of the Greenland Ice Sheet. I put on my gloves and kept going. I had crossed paths with only two hikers since Ilulissat. The wind, though, had probably encountered no one between the ice sheet and me.
After a few more miles, I finally popped out at Oqaatsut in my shorts and t-shirt. The outfit probably seemed a bit brazen on a day that had barely crossed into the single digits. A few fishermen getting into a boat had a good chuckle at my appearance. After all, it’s not every day that a non-Greenlander materializes out of the tundra.
In Oqaatsut, I knew there was a fancy restaurant that catered to tourists who opt for the one-way hike and boat back, but I didn’t think they’d want to seat the looks of my bedraggled self. After all, they’d failed to respond to an email I had sent inquiring if I’d be able to buy water or snacks while passing through.
Instead, I had planned on refueling at the local outpost of Pilersuisoq, a chain of grocery stores common in Greenland’s smaller settlements. On my way from Ilulissat, I’d daydreamed about eating potato chips or perhaps even a popsicle if I were lucky. Besides planespotting, salt and sugar are the stuff of trail runners’ dreams.
Oqaatsut’s Pilersuisoq was shut for lunch.
As it turns out, this wasn’t my lucky day. The shop was closed for an hour-long lunch. Though I would have only had to wait 15 minutes for it to reopen, that would have added too much standing around when I was already going to be on my feet all day – and when I needed to make it back to the ILLU Science and Art Centre, where my colleague from Norway was planning to whip up a big batch of waffles that night.
So, after snapping a few photos of the suspicious sled dogs and colorful homes in Oqaatsut, I headed right back to Ilulissat with the few sorry walnuts that were still in my bag. Fortunately, I’d carbo-loaded the night before on a big bowl of chicken ramen at Hangout Bistro, one of the many restaurants in Ilulissat run by the Filipino diaspora.
Back to Ilulissat
As I retraced my steps and neared Ilulissat, the sun reappeared. I knew at some point that the din of the construction vehicles would pollute the air again soon, too. To try to soak up the warmth and glitter of the Arctic tundra before the ruckus restarted, when I crossed a river now familiar to me from my outbound trek, I sat down on a rock and stuck my feet into the bracingly cold water, which was on its own journey from the ice sheet to the ocean.
While basking in the sun, suddenly, the roar of an engine tore through the skies. I looked up. An Air Greenland Dash 8 was flying overhead. This, I realized, was the Nuuk-bound plane that had just taken off from Ilulissat with several of my friends onboard.
I thought what an unusual place Greenland is, where the flights are few enough that you might know a good proportion of the people onboard a machine soaring through the sky.
Soon, though, the airplanes above Ilulissat will be stuffed with strangers. They will be just like the cruise ships that now dock every summer, dwarfing the fishing boats in Greenlandic harbors full of familiar faces.
Ilulissat is changing fast. So, too, are the tundra that hugs the coast of Greenland, the seas that crash against it, and the skies that hover above it.
Leaving Ilulissat for Iceland on a (non-)jet plane.
