Jakobshavn Glacier (Sermeq Kujalleq)

Sermeq Kujalleq — "the southern glacier" in Greenlandic, Jakobshavn in Danish — is the fastest-moving large glacier known. Where it leaves the Greenland ice sheet and enters its fjord, the ice has been clocked at more than 45 metres a day on annual average, faster still in summer. It drains around 6.5 per cent of the whole ice sheet and sends some 35 billion tonnes of ice into the sea every year, perhaps a tenth of all Greenland's icebergs. Few places on earth show the movement of ice so plainly.

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. The fjord is often packed wall to wall with ice — a white, creaking plain cut by leads of black water — and the bergs that escape drift out into Baffin Bay and south towards the Atlantic.

For scientists the glacier is one of the key records of a warming Arctic. Its front retreated about 30 km between 1850 and 1964, then held nearly still for three decades; from 1997 it accelerated sharply, and by 2012 summer speeds were roughly four times those of the 1990s. In August 2015 a single calving event broke off about 12.5 km² of ice. The whole icefjord was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2004, both for its beauty and for what it records about glaciers and climate.

Humans have lived at the edge of this spectacle for a very long time: the settlement site of Sermermiut, at the fjord mouth, preserves traces of Saqqaq, Dorset and Thule cultures going back about 4,000 years. Beside it, the Ilulissat Icefjord Centre by Dorte Mandrup, opened in 2021, is a low curved building whose roof is a wooden boardwalk and viewpoint; it houses exhibitions on ice and climate and marks the start of the trails that lead out over the rocks to the ice-choked fjord.

Getting there

The base is the town of Ilulissat at the mouth of the icefjord, founded as a trading post in 1741; Nuuk, the capital, is about 650 km to the south. Ilulissat Airport (JAV) lies about 3 km north of town and has domestic flights, notably via Kangerlussuaq. The calving front itself is far inland and is seen mainly from the air, on sightseeing flights, while the icebergs of the fjord are reached on foot from town along the marked trails via the Icefjord Centre and Sermermiut, or by boat trips into Disko Bay.