Eqi Glacier

In De Quervain Bay, at the north-eastern end of the Ata Sund fjord north of Disko Bay, the Eqi Glacier, in Greenlandic Eqip Sermia, ends in a wall of ice more than three kilometres wide, rising between 50 and 170 metres above the water. It is one of the outlet glaciers through which the Greenland ice sheet drains into the sea, and it is unusually active: the ice at its front moves forward by as much as 16 metres a day, and the cliff sheds blocks of ice into the fjord again and again.

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. In 2016 researchers using radar watched this front around the clock and recorded more than nine hundred separate calving events in only six days, making Eqi one of the best-studied calving glaciers in Greenland.

It is also a glacier with a long written record. Measurements of its front, surface and speed go back to 1912, and over most of the 20th century it changed relatively little. From the early 2000s it began to retreat: the front pulled back between 2000 and 2003, its northern lobe retreated quickly from 2009 and the southern lobe collapsed in 2013, leaving the terminus some 4 kilometres behind its position of 1920. The bare, pale rock along the fjord sides shows where the ice once stood.

The glacier also has a place in the history of polar exploration. From 1948 to 1953 the French Polar Expeditions led by Paul-Émile Victor used a landing site on the shore facing the glacier, known as Port-Victor, as their base for journeys onto the inland ice; the expedition glaciologists studied Eqi itself in 1948 and 1949. A red wooden hut built there in 1950 still stands and has been listed as a historic building by the Greenlandic authorities.

Getting there

The Eqi Glacier lies in the Avannaata municipality of West Greenland, about 80 km north of Ilulissat, the main town on Disko Bay. No roads lead there, and the glacier front is reached by sea. The nearest airport is Ilulissat (JAV), about 75 km to the south.