“Green­land is Nature’s reminder of its utter indif­fer­ence to humankind”. I have no idea of who said that, but a week of cruis­ing and vis­it­ing small vil­lages along a coast­line that tru­ly mer­its the much over­worked adjec­tive “awe­some” has giv­en me rea­son to cel­e­brate it.

The Viking adven­tur­ers who were the first Euro­peans to brave lat­i­tudes this far north of the Arc­tic Cir­cle, more than 1,000 years ago, would have seen moun­tains cov­ered with snow, glac­i­ers reach­ing deep into the myr­i­ad fiords that cleave the sed­i­men­ta­ry cliffs.

 

Mod­ern “civil­i­sa­tion” has man­aged to force the glac­i­ers back fur­ther than the mil­len­nia that pre­ced­ed us did.

The sculp­ture-like mass in the pho­to epit­o­mis­es the term “tip of the ice­berg”.It  broke off from the Qeqer­tarstaq glac­i­er, the largest in the north­ern hemi­sphere, and has tak­en as long as two years to drift the 70 kilo­me­tres to the mouth of the fiord, where it’s now ground­ed on the  300 meter deep seabed.
In places that would seem to defy, let alone not invite humans, the Inu­it peo­ple who were here long before the Vikings even guessed the place exist­ed, lived in tune with the bru­tal climate.

 Even today, sled dogs are more impor­tant than motorised trans­port when the sea freezes and snow blan­kets the land mass for months.
In Uper­navik (which incon­gru­ous­ly mans “Spring is here”), site of the north­ern-most known Viking set­tle­ment in Green­land, a local hunter has the skins of a musk ox and a ringed seal, mil­len­nia-old sta­ples of the Inu­it diet, on display.

The thick, bristly pelt of  a polar bear, an ani­mal the Inu­it both hunt and revere, is stretched on a dry­ing rack out­side his mod­est house.
The hunter nei­ther asked, nor expect­ed pay­ment beyond the oppor­tu­ni­ty to  pro­vide the few out­siders who arrived on a rare cruise ship vis­it an insight into his culture.
Cli­mate change and decreased fish­ing stocks have forced peo­ple to aban­don small out­ly­ing com­mu­ni­ties that once flour­ished in con­di­tions any­one not born and raised in Green­land is unlike­ly to  under­stand, nev­er mind endure and thrive in.

In keep­ing with Inu­it tra­di­tion, grave­yards over­look the sea. The mark­ers car­ry no names. A local guide assured us every­one who left knows exact­ly who lies where, how­ev­er.Like the peo­ple who live here, the plants are hardy, resilient  and determined.

The recent find of a per­fect­ly pre­served Arc­tic pop­py seed is the  first direct evi­dence that all of Greenland’s ice sheet melt­ed away in the recent geo­log­i­cal past.

 In a vil­lage so far north,the view from the front win­dows in the “warm months” is  ice­bergs slid­ing by on their way south, the kids still have smart phones and tablets.

 

The local teacher told us the shy, smil­ing young­sters who approached us were so excit­ed by the arrival of tourists, he’d giv­en them the morn­ing off, and an assign­ment to prac­tice Eng­lish, their third lan­guage after Green­landic and Danish.
(Much as I want­ed to take their pho­tos, I thought doing so would be treat­ing them as curiosi­ties, rather than the delight­ful­ly polite and inquis­i­tive peo­ple they are.)

                           THREATS FROM OUTSIDE

Accord­ing to an arti­cle in “Live Sci­ence: “An ice-free Green­land hap­pened at low­er lev­els of atmos­pher­ic car­bon diox­ide than present-day lev­els, so there’s poten­tial for Green­land to be ice-free again, which would raise sea lev­els drastically.”

Vis­it­ing Green­land has been one of the priv­i­leges of my life. Deny­ing that to future gen­er­a­tions through humankind’s indif­fer­ence to Nature would be an unfor­give­able sin.

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