Farthest North The End of Ice

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.