GREENLAND, ILULISSAT: FLYING OVER THE GREENLAND ICE SHEET

June 15, 2019

After dinner, so around 9:00 PM, John, Susan, Bob, and I were picked up by two guys from AirZafari for a "flightseeing" tour of the Ilulissat glacier and the Greenland ice sheet. (I'm telling you, no one sleeps in Greenland during the summer!)

I just learned the difference between an ice cap and an ice sheet from greenfacts.org:
"An ice cap is a dome-shaped mass of glacier ice that spreads out in all directions; usually larger than an ice field but less than 50,000 km². An ice sheet is a dome-shaped mass of glacier ice that covers surrounding terrain and is greater than 50,000 km², such as the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets."

The Greenland ice sheet is 1,710,000 km² (or 660,200 m² - three times the size of Texas) and is the second largest ice body in the world, right behind the Antarctic ice sheet.

Nice to know.

We boarded a six-seater plane, the two pilots in front, Bob and John in the middle . . .

and Susan and I in back:

About 80% of Greenland is covered by ice and snow, and the remaining 20% seems to be mostly rocks:

It's beautiful, but it doesn't look particularly habitable:

. . . unless you are a bird:

GREENLAND, ILULISSAT: DAYTIME ICEBERG CRUISE

June 15, 2019

Do you think I'm done with icebergs and glaciers? Not even close. We spent four days in Greenland, and every day involved at least one, and sometimes two, trips to view icebergs and/or glaciers. (It's not like there are big museums or cathedrals in Greenland. What there is is a lot of snow and ice.) I have a lot more pictures of icebergs and glaciers that I'm going to be posting. It's going to be hard to convince anyone that every day was a new experience, a new way of seeing what seemed to be essentially the same thing but was not the same thing at all. And yet, that is exactly what our experience was. We never did feel like we had overdosed on ice and snow. We are not likely to ever return to Greenland, so we had to take in as much as we could.

On our second day in Ilulissat, although we had been on a nighttime glacier cruise the previous evening, we took another daytime glacier cruise. We headed off after our walk through Ilulissat and our lackluster lunch. There was no luster lacking out on the sea:

We had a different guide than we'd had the night before, and he reinforced many of the same facts about icebergs that our previous guide had shared with us, and even though we had heard and seen it all before, it was still a jaw-dropping experience:

GREENLAND: NIGHTTIME ICEBERG CRUISE

June 14, 2019

Land of the Midnight Sun: Any of the world's northern regions above (or close to) the Arctic Circle. (Wikipedia)

"Midnight Sun" refers to the phenomenon on the earth's poles when the sun is visible all night long. Some part of the sun is visible for 24 hours a day in the Arctic Circle from about June 12 until July 1. We were fortunate to be in Greenland at a location over 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle from June 16 until June 20. We left Greenland just one day shy of the summer solstice (June 21), the day with the longest period of daylight in the Northern Hemisphere, but in Greenland, there are 2 1/2 weeks of "longest days," so we didn't miss anything.

The flag of Greenland reminds me of the midnight sun. The top white stripe represents the glaciers and ice cap covering most of the country. The bottom red stripe is the ocean that surrounds the island. The top half of the circle is the sunset (never quite setting into the ocean), and the bottom half of the circle represents the icebergs partially submerged in the ocean.

Taking advantage of the midnight sun, we were picked up for an iceberg viewing trip at 9:45 PM and didn't get back to the hotel until 1:00 or 1:30 AM.

Several years ago we cruised Alaska and went on several glacier sightseeing trips there. The Alaskan glaciers are definitely spectacular, but our Greenland midnight sun cruise was a very different kind of spectacular.

First of all, these two other boats are the only ones we saw the entire night, and most of the time we couldn't see or hear either one of them.

The few times we saw one of the boats, we appreciated the fact that they were not huge, noisy cruise ships jam-packed with tourists.

GREENLAND: ILULISSAT

June 14, 2019

I love the name of the first place we visited in Greenland: Ilulisssat (ill-LOO-li-sat). It rolls off the tongue, much more so than the original name of the village: Jakobshavn (Jacob's Haven), which was the name given to it by the Danes who settled it in 1741. The name Ilulissat is the local word for "iceberg," a very appropriate name as will be shown in future posts.

Ilulissat is the most popular tourist destination in Greenland, and tourism is its principal industry. It sits right next to a UNESCO World Heritage site, the Ilulissat Icefjord, and it has developed a nice infrastructure for tourism.

The first thing that stood out to me about Ilulissat is that there are no straight streets other than one that goes through the center of town. I was sure our driver was lost when we were taken from the airport to our hotel because it seemed we were trapped in an endless weaving around and through town.

We stayed the first night in the Hotel Icefiord, and then moved the second night to a slightly nicer hotel, the Hotel Arctic, because of some complications we had when rearranging the trip because of a cancelled flight. Our view from the Hotel Icefiord was definitely better than our view from the Hotel Arctic:  

A seal skin tacked to the desk in the check-in area is not a customary sight where we are from, but we saw a lot more animal skins during the next few days:

Our room was clean but spare, and the most important item was hanging from a hook in the bathroom:

The second thing I noticed was the ubiquitous icebergs. From our hotel room window, we could see a dozen or so medium-sized icebergs and lots of baby icebergs floating in the bay, complete with sapphire-colored edges that are hard to see in this photo: