Exploring the fjords of Greenland’s Scoresby Sound

Travel

It’s a drizzly day in Scoresby Sund, and expedition leader Bernabe Urtubey is scouting the base of Sol Glacier when a gigantic cavity wall suddenly breaks away, sending a violent shockwave across the bay.

ByMike MacEacheran

Published December 18, 2023

• 13 min read

This article was produced by National Geographic Traveller (UK)

Ice slams into the brine. An avalanche follows like poured powdered sugar. A wave breaks with the boom of cannon fire. Moving to the safety of more remote waters, we survey the trauma from afar. The glacier growls once again. 

“Good for the movies, not the environment,” says Bernabe when asked what he feels about the calving slab. “The glaciers are decaying too fast. It’s a tap that can’t be turned off.” He traces his fingers along the icecap’s grooves and between the two peaks that bookend the ice shelf’s onward rush into the sea. “It’s beautiful, but dangerous and scary at the same time.”

Bernabe has been guiding in the polar latitudes ever since he left Argentinian Patagonia — the marine biologist has seen seas rolling and rising here for two decades now — and he doesn’t pretend east Greenland is without its problems. One of the most inaccessible places on the planet, this part of the Arctic is on the front line of the climate crisis and Bernabe is a first-hand witness to how Scoresby Sund and its labyrinth of fjords is changing. Greenland’s ice cap is bigger than the US, yet it’s vanishing 100 times faster than previously calculated, he tells me, and the icebergs that percolate into the fjord after being dragged south by the East Greenland Current are more unpredictable — and more monstrous — than ever.

Going with the floe

Few landscapes so thoroughly put sailors in their place as Scoresby Sund. Known as ‘Kangertittivaq’ by the Inuits and Bigetey Boo by the Danes, the world’s largest fjord system is a maze of inlets and icebergs — sparkling blue in late summer and ghost white in other seasons. It’s a fjord with unreliably mapped depth charts, too, and, with the seaway closed to all ships when it freezes over from September to mid-July, fewer than 1,000 visitors make it this far every year. It’s certainly an arrangement that suits the landscape: unlike Greenland’s far busier west coast, this is a truly wild place preserved in pristine condition. It feels as remote as it’s possible to get. A good place, I think, to be an iceberg left to drift.

Bernabe had eased me in gently to the extremes of the landscape on board M/V Sea Spirit, a vessel run by polar operator Poseidon Expeditions. We’d sailed from Reykjavik across the Denmark Strait to get here — more than a day and a half rolling in heaving seas. We first anchored in Viking Bay, an iceberg-littered bay where we’d received a warm welcome from the dawn and nature surrounding us. Upon arrival, we’d headed up to the ship’s top deck to absorb the symphony of autumnal colours and fanfare of light. It felt like taking box seats before curtain-up on opening night.

The next day, we learn to appreciate the intimate dance between bergs, floes and glaciers. Out on the water with Bernabe, it’s part education, part quiz, and I’m soon learning to work out an iceberg’s age, and even temperament, from its colour, with the different hues revealing details akin to a lonely-hearts advert, it turns out. Alabaster-white means young and bubbly, I’m told. Sapphire-blue is more mature, but still likes to travel. Black can be impulsive and dangerously flirty with boats.

With a bit of imagination, the smallest details also recast the icebergs as other things altogether. One is all ramparts rising to steeples and soaring turrets like Edinburgh Castle. Another has a gigantic curve and could be Marble Arch. A trick of perspective makes some in the distance seem as large as mountains. Snowdonia, I think, or perhaps Buachaille Etive Mòr in Glencoe. “You’ll be the first to have ever laid eyes on these,” says Bernabe, as he slows the outboard motor for a closer look at the floating gallery of freshly carved ice. “Maybe the last.” This is a landscape-scale freezer on defrost and almost not of this planet.

As the days fall into a rhythm of rigid inflatable boat rides and coastal hikes, I realise a visit to this fragile edge of Greenland combines two incompatible things: seeing top-notch nature and treading on land that encounters few visitors. During a boat cruise in Rypefjord, I watch two male musk oxen with bouffant hairdos collide with the impact of a head-on train crash when competing for breeding rights. I hike across empty tundra, yards from a cotton-white Arctic hare, only to scare the daylights out of it and its offspring. While walking along a beach at Sydkap, with hunks of diamond ice hurled against the shore, the silence is broken by the trill of an agitated glaucous gull. “What are you doing here?” seems to be its cry.

Other experiences offer glimpses of this almost secret world. In Harefjord, a seal is hunted through the sea ice by a ghostly polar bear I never quite see. The next day I nearly step on a northern collared lemming while picking over a landscape of dwarf willow and crowberry. During a boat ride in the shade of icebergs as big as battleships, black-legged kittiwakes surface-dip for fish. In many places, wildlife is accustomed and often ambivalent to us. In Scoresby Sund, every creature, from the barnacle geese to northern wheatears, eavesdrops as if itching for news from the outside world.

For co-expedition guide Sergey Shirokiy, who carries a bolt-action rifle and holstered flare gun on land in case of a polar bear rendezvous, the native fauna isn’t nearly as abundant as it should be or once was. The firearm makes me apprehensive, but I have no real need to be. What I know about the hunting traditions of Greenlandic communities sketches a stark reality for the area’s creatures, including the world’s largest land carnivore. Estimates claim there are only a few thousand polar bears left in Greenland, with hundreds still being shot and skinned every year for meat and fur. 

In Ittoqqortoormiit (the fjord’s only village: population 350), locals make full use of their annual quota of 35 bears, with hunting season extending from 1 October to the end of July. Wolf and fox populations have also been dramatically impacted by centuries of fur trade. The emptiness reflects the daily realities of life in a fjord whose closest neighbour is at least 500 miles away across untouched terrain.

“Your senses sharpen on land here, but as for things that can bite, chase or kill you, Greenland isn’t like other places in the Arctic,” says Sergey, one morning as we climb to a viewpoint overlooking Øfjord. “Fox, wolf and polar bear are scarce. So too are whale, orca and narwhal. Scoresby Sund is for landscapes on a scale you’ve probably never encountered before.” 

Fittingly, the reward for seeing such superlative wonders is a visitor experience that’s increasingly regulated. In a move to create a protective ring-fence around wildlife, new restrictions on landing sites were introduced by the Greenlandic government in June 2023 and the distances expedition operators can cover are now limited by a speed restriction of three knots per hour (the average cruising speed of Arctic vessels is around 10.5 knots). Another concession to the environment given by the government is that half of Scoresby Sund has become a no-go zone. But even without a surplus of creatures, the fjord is a symbol of a precarious world so rarely seen — and I’m dumbfounded by the scenery alone.

Bear necessities 

Several days later, we dock in Ittoqqortoormiit and it feels almost disappointing to see other people. There’s a vault-ribbed church that resembles an upturned Viking longship; a school and an artificial football pitch; a supermarket where guns for sale dangle above the frozen meat cabinet; and brightly coloured houses with clothes lines pegged with laundry drying in the sun. One carries a musk ox hide. Another is weighed down by a polar bear pelt next to a pair of flapping underpants. 

Near the village pier, I see a hunter feeding a pack of feverish huskies, each one chained to the ground yet still committed enough to perform acrobatic flips into the air. There are almost as many dogs in Ittoqqortoormiit as snowmobiles and they help haul in animal carcasses on ragged wooden sleds to keep the community fed while waiting for their biannual food supply to arrive by ship. How much, I ask, are these dogs worth? “We wouldn’t survive without them,” the old Inuit man replies, throwing scrap meat to a dog from a bucket. An outcry descends. To add to the clamour, a raven caws from a rooftop, perhaps planning a smash-and-grab raid. 

To steal a final quiet moment, I climb to Ittoqqortoormiit’s graveyard, where white crosses gather like wildflowers and seem reluctant to stand upright; the tundra has pushed so many out of the hardened soil, most lean away from the sea air. It’s a clear day, with Scoresby Sund glistening shades of pewter, and I gaze out across the bay of icebergs and distant mountains, then take a seat on the tundra to reflect — it’s the perfect grand finale. 

I’m alone until the call to return to the ship, when we rejoin the sea and set course back to Iceland. By midafternoon, our vessel — the last arrival of this brief polar season — has left Scoresby Sund. By sunset, east Greenland is behind us, ablaze under a sky of fire, while wholly consumed by endless ice and deep Arctic silence.  

Published in the Experiences Collection 2023/24, distributed with the Jan/Feb 2024 issue of National Geographic Traveller (UK).

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