Images of

THE ARCTIC

The Ice Edge

Photos © 2004 Seth White

Home

On the way back home, I ended up with a few days in Kangerlussuaq. The one thing I was absolutely set on doing while there was seeing the ice edge. It's 15 miles from the town, and there is actually a nice road leading out there. I was bound and determined to do this...even if I had to ride the whole way out and back. It actually worked out very nicely though. On a relatively slow day, five of us did a day trip out where one drove and four rode bicycles back to town. Here is the end point of our little excursion - the edge of the Greenland Ice Cap. See here for some panoramas and text about the trip. All I really have to say about this is "wow". If the Flat Earthers were right and there was an actual end of the world, it would probably have looked something like this.

A pic of the ice, framed in between a hillside in its autumn red colors and a huge hill of rubble pushed up by the glacier's scouring action. The first crossing of Greenland was done by Nansen and Johanssen just over a century ago. Quite a feat, and even with today's modern technology and navigation, this endeavor is still worthy of much respect.

One of my favorite pics from this trip. Glaciers have taken on a special fascination for me, and it is a shame they are disappearing at such an incredible rate worldwide.

Another thing that I have gotten interested in is the Arctic vegetation. This is a look at the typical stuff that grows right along the ice edge. The scenery was a lot more red-colored on my way out from Summit than on my way in. I'm told that later in the fall the hills around Kangerlussuaq will take on an even deeper red color. The fact that these little plants, lichens, mosses, and mushrooms (!) can survive at all here is incredible.

Speaking of mushrooms, here is a FUNGUS I found farther down the road. Didn't expect to find these above the Arctic Circle...

Another shroom.

Looking out at the ice over a glacial lake.

A pic of Whitney (from VECO) riding along the road through this surreal landscape. The ice edge has grown and shrunk over the millenia, leaving huge hills of rock in its wake. This road goes out to Camp Aurora (see the panoramas page for more about this), and I have heard that if you mosey out that way, you WILL be greeted at the entrance by people whose main interest it is to get you to leave the way you came. On the other hand, the road from the land to the camp is a great way to avoid crevasses that form in the ice as its flow is disturbed by the land...so it is a popular route with the intrepid types who trek across the ice sheet.

Another one of the road itself. Pedaling along the first part of this road was one of those rare times I've known exactly where I was and how lucky I was to be there.

Further along, there is this dramatic scene that shows just what kind of power a glacier really has. Looking at this, it is easy to imagine how places like Glacier National Park can be formed out of hard rock by these ice flows.

Another view of the glacier edge, with some cotton grass growing in the foreground. The white tufts are the plant's seeds...kind of like a dandelion...and they are unbelievable soft.

A waterfall, fed by runoff from the ice. There is a LOT of water rushing through here in the late summer, and it makes quite the racket.

A more panoramic look at the same scene.

Along the way back, I was definitely the straggler since I kept stopping to take photos and walk around. This little outcropping near the waterfall was a nice spot, and this split rock caught my eye.

And nearby is this picnic spot, where Kangerlussuaq Tourism will have BBQ's for people on day trips to the ice edge. A great place to grill slabs of red meat and drink malted beverages, if you ask me.

My other favorite picture from the trip.

The sheer glacier face, with the river flowing by. An unrelated aside - on the LC-130's there are these little stand-up urinals on either side of the plane. When you open the lid to begin your business, you are greeted by a picture of Bin Laden on the base of the urinal which you can soak to your bladder's content. This cracked me up every time. I even thought about taking a picture (being the shameless tourist that I am) but upon further recollection I figured this would probably be bad form.

At a few points along the way, the glacier took on this smooth, grey elephant-skin texture as it thinned and spread out after mixing with the soil.

More of the elephant skin.

A beautiful waterfall running down the hill of rubble by the edge of the glacier. There is a word to describe these pinnacles of ice on top of glaciers, but in spite of efforts to remember this word my memory has failed me. Awesome nonetheless.

Getting close to the end of the glacier now, with a nice lake in the foreground. If my dubious memory serves, this is the Russell Glacier which protrudes from the ice sheet towards Kangerlussuaq.

A great backdrop for spending the day crusing around in your boat, no?

A beautiful deep blue lake shore. On the trip back to NY from Kangerlussuaq, I talked for a while with this fellow Billy who is a limnologist studying the lakes around this area. Yet another area of science to which I had no prior exposure. There is quite a bit that a careful observer can learn from sediment cores drilled from lakes, as well as the structure of the lake itself.

Leaving the glacier behind now, here is one more photo looking back with more cotton grass. Neat stuff.

While retreating, the glacier decided to leave this nearly cubic rock sitting right here, overlooking a lake.

A little closer to town there is this plane wreck scattered on both sides of the road. The story is that sometime in the 1960's there were three planes circling over Sondre Stromfjord waiting for some severe weather to clear so they could land. The weather wasn't going anywhere, so the order was given to the three pilots to get the planes suitably far from town and then eject (they lived, by the way). The planes ended up scattered around the base, and in fact one of them wasn't found until many years later. But evidently the USAF didn't look too hard for them since they were trainers and did not have any secret technology on board. So this is me taking a break at the crash site for one of them. I found a piece of pipe that had a badge on it with a manufacture date of 1962. It's curious that this wreckage has just sat here for so long.

A photo of the typical little trees that grow along the ground - up to about chest high at the most.

The broad-leafed willow herb flower. After the blooms die, the rest of the flower's stem opens up into four prongs with fluffy white dandelion-style seeds inside.

Closer to town, the river opens up into sort of a delta. So here is the beach...which has a somewhat different set of plants growing on it than the hillsides or the ground along the ice edge itself.

And finally, the river itself. I saw it referred to as "Watson River" or "Watson Creek" in the Kangerlussuaq museum, but it probably is now known by an Inuit name.