Ilulissat Icefjord
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Interesting facts
- Some icebergs leaving the glacier stand up to a kilometre tall, too deep to float out, so they ground on the fjord's shallows for years.
- The ice carried through the fjord can be up to about 250,000 years old, making it a valuable archive of past climate.
- Large icebergs first drift north on ocean currents, then turn south and can survive as far as 40 to 45 degrees north, level with New York.
- The glacier drains about 6.5 percent of the entire Greenland ice sheet, the highest outflow of any glacier draining it.
- Scientists have studied the glacier for more than 250 years; geologist Hinrich Rink introduced the name Jakobshavn into scientific literature in 1853.
- Its calving front retreated about 30 kilometres between 1850 and 1964, then held almost still for some 35 years.
- Major calving events trigger glacial earthquakes above magnitude 5 that register on seismographs around the world.
- The 2012 documentary Chasing Ice filmed about 7.4 cubic kilometres of ice breaking off here, the longest calving event ever recorded on camera.
- The fjord lies about 250 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle, and the local name Sermeq Kujalleq simply means southern glacier.
- Local fishers report that halibut caught inside the icefjord tend to be larger than those from open Disko Bay.
Why it is worth it
Ilulissat Icefjord is where one of the fastest glaciers on the planet meets the sea. Sermeq Kujalleq, also called Jakobshavn Isbræ, pushes out of the Greenland ice sheet at a rate usually measured in tens of metres per day, and the fjord it feeds carries its icebergs some 40 km west to Disko Bay. The volume is hard to picture: on the order of 20 billion tonnes of ice pass out of the fjord each year, and the glacier is credited with roughly a tenth of all the icebergs that calve from Greenland. The fjord is some 6 km wide, and its surface is often packed with ice from shore to shore.
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.
People have lived at the fjord's edge for about 4,000 years. At Sermermiut, beside the fjord near the town, archaeologists have found remains of three successive cultures — Saqqaq, early Dorset and Thule. A raised boardwalk leads there, and the marked Blue and Yellow hiking routes continue along the rocky shore above the ice.
At the start of the boardwalk stands the Ilulissat Icefjord Centre, designed by the Danish architect Dorte Mandrup and opened in July 2021. Its roof works as an extension of the hiking trail, leading out towards the views of the ice, and inside an exhibition tells the story of the ice and of the people who have lived beside it. Boat trips among the icebergs, including late-evening sailings in summer, and sightseeing flights over the glacier front show the scale that cannot be grasped from land.
Getting there
The icefjord begins at the edge of Ilulissat, a town on Disko Bay; the capital, Nuuk, is some 560 km to the south. Ilulissat Airport (JAV) lies just outside the town. The boardwalk to Sermermiut and the marked hiking routes start at the Icefjord Centre on the edge of town.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Ilulissat Icefjord is a fjord in western Greenland. Located 250 km north of the Arctic Circle, the Ilulissat Icefjord runs west 40 km (25 mi) from the Greenland ice sheet to Disko Bay just south of the town of Ilulissat. Ilulissat Icefjord was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2004 because of its natural beauty and the importance of the fast-moving Jacobshavn Glacier in developing the current scientific understanding of anthropogenic climate change.
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