Visiting the world’s greatest river of ice requires quite a journey. For starters: just getting to the west coast of Greenland. Remote by any standard, the flights are complicated, and the best way to navigate your way there is by ship, sailing through frigid waters and icebergs.
I stepped off at the top of a ridge, the multicolored town now at my feet. A glassy, brand-new visitor center shimmered before me under a reluctant Arctic late-summer sun. But even here, all that ice remained hidden. Down a boardwalk, around the corner. When I finally got there, it was a truly magnificent site.
There’s no place on earth like Ilulissat.
More icebergs are born here than in any other spot in the Northern Hemisphere. (Not a surprise: Ilulissat literally means “icebergs” in the Greenlandic language.) Formerly known as Jakobshavn, this town of about 4,600 people attracts more tourists than any other place in Greenland.
The art museum here is very nice, showcasing works from Greenland and around the world, including a permanent collection by Emanuel Petersen, who painted Greenland’s harsh, frozen landscapes in a warm, rich, romantic style. You can get a great musk ox burger—the meat is freshly hunted—at the local cafe. And there’s even good shopping, whether you’re looking for souvenir knickknacks or hand-hewn works in antler and bone at the local carving shop.
But literally everybody who arrives here is looking for one thing: the Ilulissat Icefjord. It’s a fascinating and truly unique geographic wonder—one recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2004.
Famously, the Greenland ice sheet is the largest ice body in the Northern Hemisphere (second only to the one in Antarctica). It’s unimaginably huge. Stretching 1,800 miles from north to south (much further than the distance of, say, New York City to Miami), it also widens to 680 miles at its broadest point.
But there are few places where all that ice actually reaches the sea—which is one of the things that makes Ilulissat so special. Some of the ice sheet moves into the Sermeq Kujalleq glacier. This is one of the most active and fastest-moving glaciers in the world, marching forward by about 130 feet daily (lightning speed for a glacier). It calves about 10 percent of Greenland’s calf ice—again, the most in the world, outside of Antarctica.
And all of that ice is pushed down through the Icefjord, which is jammed with icebergs just lined up and waiting to be pushed out to sea so that they can float into the North Atlantic and down the eastern seaboard, inspiring awe among all who spot their frozen majesty.
Before I descended the boardwalk to see it for myself, I spent a little time in the visitor center. The building itself is a wonder; it just opened in the summer of 2021. The design, by renowned Danish architect Dorte Mandrup, was inspired by a snowy owl landing on a mountaintop. You can even walk on the roof, where you’ll find stunning views of mountains and icebergs.
Inside, I paused to pull little cloth booties over the bottom of my gum boots, a requirement to preserve the immaculate wood floors. After a latte in the cafe, I wandered through the permanent exhibition, “The Story of the Ice.”
Sometimes, the displays are technical, showing in bright colors how all that ice moves from sheet to sea—some 50 billion tons of it, just in the first 20 years of the 21st century. Others are a little abstract, including a whole room dedicated to “eleven movements of the cryoscape,” speakers transmitting the sound of eleven different Greenland locations, and sonic documentation of wind, waves, and even earthquakes, all related to inland ice. Things get poetic, too. One of the exhibits notes that “all great things begin small,” tracing how all icebergs start with just one single snowflake.
And finally, it was time to see it for myself. Bundling up in anticipation of katabatic winds, I trooped out onto the boardwalk, which wound through the tundra. Across, down, around, and then back up. The last bit went up a staircase.
Scrambling up some huge rocks for a better view, the scene spread out before me. Just ice, in every direction. The actual glacier is about 25 miles up from where I stood. The glimmering scene before me was essentially a series of icebergs in waiting. The oldest ice here dates back 250,000 years. To my right, at the mouth of the fjord, huge bergs were hung up on a terminal moraine, their journey to the sea delayed by a couple of years until the pressure can build to the point of pushing them out onto Disko Bay.
