Saturday, September 02, 2006

Ice fjord of Ilulissat

During my stay in Greenland, I took at trip to a northern Greenlandic town called Ilulissat with a polish friend. It is one of the most beautiful places I have ever been to. The town is situated near an ice fjord. The Greenlandic ice cap near Ilulissat is one of the fastest retreating glaciers in the world (3 meters/hour!!!), which creates floating ice bergs in the fjord. Above picture is approaching Ilulissat passing over the icebergs.

We camped near Sermermiut, which is a place to see the retreating glacier. The glacier used to be all the way out here and since it is retreating so fast, people would hike up to these benches on top of the surrounding mountains and watch the glacier calve. Now, there are only icebergs, but you can hear the calving among the icebergs breaking the silence from time to time.



When I showed some of my pictures to someone living in Greenland for a few years, he was surprised to see water here. When he visited here last (not so long ago), he saw only the glacier and it was impossible to take a boat in this place. Now, we saw waterways like this among the glaciers (it would not be wise to take a boat in there though!). A recent BBC article expresses concerns over melting ice caps.

3 comments:

aequo animo (advocatus diaboli) said...

Coool :)

Relatively Speaking said...

@Hemanth: :)

Vikas said...

wow 3meters/hour is fast!!