Farthest North The End of Ice

By dogsled to Siorapaluk, the northernmost subsistence village in the world. Population: between 50 and 62. A dog team travels about 10 km per hour. It should take 6 hours to get there, but the snow is wet and the ice under it is mushy. Still, it’s good to be on a dogsled again. There are three sleds: Gedeon takes Carsten the photographer, Mamarut takes Navarana (the translator) and Evelyn; I’m traveling with Mikele. Their brother-in-law, Jens Danielsen, my usual traveling companion, was just elected mayor of Qaanaaq and he’s too busy to come. They’ve hunted an extended family group all their lives.
We leave in semi-darkness. The rough ice at the shore is thicker than usual. Lines snag on bits of ice. There are hard bumps. The sled tilts precariously as we rumble through the labyrinth. Out on the smooth ice, there’s open water visible. Here and there we pass a half-melted iceberg that is stranded close to shore. The air temperature is quite warm but so much open water makes the wind feel cold. We hug the coast. At one headland, we are forced to go up on the ice foot because of open water. Nine hours later, just after dark, we arrive.

The next morning we visit Otto and Pauline Simigaq. They are fine traditional hunters who are now beset with food and money problems because of the condition of the sea ice. “Seven years ago we could travel on safe ice all winter and get animals. We didn’t worry about food then. Now it’s different.” He looks out at the fjord. “This is the second ice of the winter. In the fall we now have to sail to get walrus. The seas are very rough now and its dangerous. We always went to the ice edge west of Kiatak Island. Lots of walrus out there. But the ice doesn’t go that far out now. The ice edge moves closer each year. The walrus are still there, but we can’t get to them.”

Last week Gedeon and a friend were out on the ice when an unexpected blizzard hit. The ice all around him broke up, and soon he and his dogsled were adrift. He leapt when the ice under his sled began to break up; his hunting companion to leapt to another. They drifted apart, away from shore, out to sea. The other man’s sled and dogs disappeared when the drift ice broke again. Gedeon was safe but going farther and farther toward Ellesmere Island. Many hours later a helicopter rescued both men. Gedeon’s dogs were saved, but not his sled.

In Siorapaluk, a hunter had tied his dogs to the ice for a moment, ran up to his house to get a drink of water, and when he went back out, the fjord ice had broken up completely. He never saw his dogs again.

Snow filled the schoolhouse and blew into the small doghouses where females with pups find shelter. Eva, the schoolteacher said, “It was a terrible night when no one slept, yet we could not get to each other. A dog’s house flew against my front door and the dog inside died. Every window was blanked out by snow.

Afternoon. We go by dogsled out onto the fjord ice to fish for halibut. It’s unusually windy. As we bump through rough shore ice, I can see open water in every direction. Wind has been plaguing Arctic hunters everywhere. A Greenland winter is usually placid and cold, but for the last five years there have been ground blizzards and unstable ice. Looking west toward Ellesmere Island where the ice edge should be, there’s a blue bruise in the sky, a roll of dark clouds that do not move: this is “sea smoke.” It means open water. The ice used to be 12 to 14 feet thick in February. Now it’s 7 inches thick. Twice the fjord ice at Siorapaluk has gone out completely, and refrozen. “We’ve not seen it do that before.”

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The once-a-week flight from Ilulissat to Qaanaaq finally leaves. As we fly north over the Nussuuaq Peninsula what I see shocks me: beyond narrow aprons of shorefast ice, wide leads open between rotting panes of gray pancake ice, and splinters into strands like hair. Icebergs wallow in moats, their edges worn down at a time of year when they should be monumental and sharp.

Between the island rock of Uummannaaq and the north-facing Illorsuit Strait where years ago I traveled by dogsled up every inlet, every fjord, stopping at every island where the American painter Rockwell Kent lived and worked, there is open water.

North from Upernavik, the long Melville Strait where Knud Rasmussen and Peter Freuchen ferried goods and food back and forth to their station at Thule is now an icy ruin – not even strong enough to hold a single dogsled.

We fly into a deeper shade of blue. It is a sky with a memory of the dark time in winter. Some ice cover but every large lead has smaller leads branching from it. Some “describe” a rough circle, others widen, untangling ice. The rising sun behind us is tied to the horizon. New ice flattens whitecaps into smooth gray expanses that break into geometric oddities. Wherever there isn’t rotting ice, there is open water with white caps pushing west.

At 78 degrees L. North we fly over white lobes of icecap called “Steensby Land.” Below I can see the exact route the four hunters with whom I was traveling took in 2004 from the hut where we’d been stranded by 59 below zero temperatures for three days; where our four sleds lunged up and over a glacier, across the ice cap, and down a rocky streambed to the shore where there was more bad ice. “We could not make that trip now,” Mamarut tells me later. “It is now open water every place we went by dogsled that year.” (see map and my article in the January 2006 National Geographic Magazine: “The Ice Hunters.”)

The plane flies across the mouth of Inglefield (Kangerlussuaq) Fjord, with the town of is Qaanaaq perched on the far hill. There’s a strip of rumpled shore ice, then miles and miles of open water between Greenland and Ellesmere Island. The North pole is 700 miles away.

Evening. The full impact of the ice loss has taken hold. I’m in a rage. Not for myself but for all who “travel the path of ice.” Here’s how to think about it: if you had a thousand acre farm that had been cut down to one acre, how would you live, feed your family and animals, and make a living?

Seven years ago – in 2000 – hunters from Qaanaaq, Siorapaluk, Moriusaq, and Savissivik could go out on the sea ice from late September to late June, traveling freely for hundreds of miles - as far north as Humboldt Glacier and as far south as Ilulissat. Now their backyard ice is too thin to hold their sleds. Nine months of hunting has been reduced to three. And those three months are full of uncertainties. Too many days it is not safe to go out on the ice at all.

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Starting on tour again - Carsten Peter and Hans Jense in Greenland.

Sunset over Qaanaaq.
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We rise above the Danish gloom and enter sunlight. It is a winter sun, cold and low in the sky. Perhaps the term, climate change, should be changed to climate care, since it is carelessness that is bringing so much of life on this planet to an end.

The coast of Greenland appears: the snow-covered continental ice sheet hangs like hard sauce over the island, tonguing nunataks. The sky throws pink on snow-covered rock. It’s winter. Ukiok. A time of perpetual sunrise or else, sunset, with no day between. This is the first light of the year. The town of Qaanaaq saw sunrise only two days ago - and the wild stirrings of a melting Greenland ice cap that is everywhere in the news - are nowhere to be seen.

Over the icecap and down into the slot of Kangerlussuaq’s 103 mile-long fjord we go. A serious wind tosses the Airbus like a flea. First light is coming. The ice cap is the umbilicus from which all the ruined ice of the world came.

We fly into a box canyon. At the end is a blue floodlight – the terminus of a glacier. On both sides of the plane cerulean tarns, stippled ice, and ice-grooved rock walls flash by as we drop and twist. The sky is a sliver of apricot, then spilled claret; the fjord-ice is gray.

How can it be that we left Denmark at 9:15 in the morning and now it is only 9:50, though we’ve been flying more than four hours? It seems that here we must move backward in time to go forward at all. Here, the vertical stops: gained latitude dissolves into an ever-broader horizon; we lose ground and step onto hikuliaq – thin ice. Reference points and escape routes are erased; we enter aboriginal time.

At the Kangerlussuaq airport it is impossible not to see people I know. A friend from New York with whom I backpacked across Greenland’s Warming Land shows up, and friends from the Inuit Circumpolar conference who I saw last summer in Barrow, Alaska are there. The usual departure delays allow us all time to eat, talk, and make new friends. That’s part of the Arctic’s generosity. Planes are delayed because up here, time expands.

Finally we fly. Our plane bumps north toward Ilulissat. We angle up from the fjord and enter the realm of the continental ice sheet – what Greenlanders refer to as “the inland ice.”

The icecap is the center of emptiness. It is snow-covered and wind-haunted. Snow is a kind of gravel scratching music from glacier ice. To the north is the unpolished summit - a platform of white, a high nothingness that is made of dreamless sleep.