The Most Beautiful Natural Wonders in Greenland
5 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful natural wonders in Greenland are Greenland ice sheet, Ilulissat Icefjord and Jakobshavn Glacier (Sermeq Kujalleq). The list covers 5 natural wonders. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Greenland is the one place outside Antarctica where an ice sheet still covers most of the land. The ice spreads outward from the interior and pours through gaps in the coastal mountains as outlet glaciers, which drop icebergs into fjords and the sea, so the island's great natural wonders are all made of ice in motion.
The Greenland ice sheet itself covers around four-fifths of the island and reaches more than 3 kilometres thick, enough ice to raise world sea levels by about 7 metres if it melted. Jakobshavn Glacier, or Sermeq Kujalleq, is among the fastest-flowing glaciers on Earth and produces a large share of the island's icebergs. They drift down Ilulissat Icefjord, a UNESCO site where towering bergs crowd the water before reaching Disko Bay. North of Ilulissat, Eqi Glacier ends in a high wall of ice that regularly calves into the sea with a roar heard across the bay.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Greenland ice sheet | Glacier | |
| 2 | Ilulissat Icefjord | Fjord | ✓ |
| 3 | Jakobshavn Glacier (Sermeq Kujalleq) | Glacier | |
| 4 | Tasermiut Fjord | Fjord | |
| 5 | Eqi Glacier | Glacier |
01 Greenland ice sheet
Greenland76.700° N 41.200° W
Chmee2 / Valtameri · CC BY 3.0 It isn't a scaled-down copy of Antarctica, either. Greenland's ice sheet sits far enough south — between roughly 60° and 80° N — that it isn't actually inside the polar zone the way its southern counterpart is, and it lacks Antarctica's vast floating ice shelves.
Did you know? The oldest ice found in Greenland is about a million years old, and soil beneath the summit has stayed buried under ice for roughly 2.7 million years.
02 Ilulissat Icefjord
Greenland69.150° N 49.550° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by SarahNic from Pixabay UNESCO inscribed the fjord in 2004, and the protected area covers more than 400,000 hectares, much of it ice. The Greenlandic name of the fjord is Kangia. For the visitor, the experience is simple and overwhelming: towers of ice several storeys high, sculpted into arches and caves, drifting almost silently past, their colour changing from pure white at noon to gold and pink under the low summer and midnight sun.
Did you know? Scientists have studied the glacier for more than 250 years; geologist Hinrich Rink introduced the name Jakobshavn into scientific literature in 1853.
03 Jakobshavn Glacier (Sermeq Kujalleq)
Greenland69.983° N 50.117° W
Giles Laurent · CC BY-SA 4.0 The glacier discharges into Ilulissat Icefjord, which runs about 40 km west to Disko Bay. Icebergs calved at the front can stand hundreds of metres from waterline to keel; at the fjord mouth the largest run aground on a submerged moraine sill some 200 m down and sit there, jammed together, until they break up or are pushed out.
Did you know? From 1955 to 1985 its front moved at a steady pace of about 20 metres a day, and the glacier appeared to be in balance.
04 Tasermiut Fjord
Greenland60.270° N 44.780° W
amanderson2 · CC BY 2.0 The fjord runs from north-east to south-west and opens into the Labrador Sea of the North Atlantic. It separates two long mountainous peninsulas. On the western side rises Napasorsuaq at 1,590 m; on the eastern side stand Ulamertorsuaq at 1,858 m, Nalumasortoq at 2,045 m and Ketil at 2,010 m, whose sheer faces have made the fjord a famous destination for big-wall climbers and the site of many new routes.
Did you know? Ulamertorsuaq has four separate summits, all above 1,820 metres, and was first climbed in 1977.
05 Eqi Glacier
Greenland69.817° N 50.067° W
David Stanley from Nanaimo, Canada · CC BY 2.0 The front is not uniform. Its northern part stands in shallow water, only a few metres to about 20 metres deep, where the ice face is very high and inclined and breaks off in frequent, large collapses. The southern part reaches into water 70 to 100 metres deep and ends in a lower, vertical cliff. Between the two, a ridge of bedrock breaks the surface.
Did you know? After a slow retreat from 1920 to the 1960s, Eqi actually pushed forward again slightly in the 1980s before its sharp retreat in the 2000s.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful natural wonders in Greenland?
- On our list, Greenland ice sheet ranks first, followed by Ilulissat Icefjord and Jakobshavn Glacier (Sermeq Kujalleq).
- How thick is the Greenland ice sheet?
- At its thickest the ice sheet is just over 3 kilometres deep. It covers roughly 80 percent of Greenland and is the second-largest body of ice on Earth after the Antarctic ice sheet.
- Why is Ilulissat Icefjord a World Heritage Site?
- It was inscribed in 2004 because it is fed by Sermeq Kujalleq, one of the fastest and most active glaciers in the world, and because it has been central to the scientific study of climate and ice-sheet glaciology for more than 250 years.
- How many natural wonders are on this list in Greenland?
- The list covers 5 natural wonders.