Farthest North The End of Ice

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.