I'm sitting atop a small hill of smooth rock watching centuries of history drift by. In front of me, Disko Bay is filled with icebergs – big ones, smooth ones, small ones. They seem to be waiting, glinting in the midnight sun. It's approaching 11 p.m. in this village north of the Arctic Circle, but the sun is still two arms' lengths away from the horizon and won't set for a couple of weeks.
From my perch, it's the scale of the scene, not the beauty of each iceberg, that is most impressive. The view is both peaceful and striking. It's one of those travel-earned vistas that stays in your mind: the red rooftops of Florence from the Campanile, the golden forts of Jaisalmer at sunset, and, here, the shimmering white icebergs of Greenland pausing in the bay. They are manifestations of great spans of time, formed from the yearly accumulation of snow compacted into ice over centuries. In drilling ice samples from the icepack – which swathes much of the island – scientists have dated core ice to 200,000 years or older. This is about the time when homo sapiens began to roam the African savanna.
But the icebergs' stillness, however, is an illusion. As I pull open the thick curtains at Hotel Arctic and look out onto Disko Bay, the view shifts. One morning, the change is especially dramatic. Some time through the quiet night, a thousand bergs have moved closer; the harbour is choked with small bergs known as growlers, and the larger ones – an icy mountain range – now loom near the edge of town.
While Greenland often draws a passing glance on a polar-route flight or conjures up Vikings – or the 10th-century marketing spin by Erik the Red, who came up with the island's contrary name – today, the country is becoming known as a destination at the forefront of climate change.
The ice cap on the world's largest island is melting at an alarming rate. The ice cap – which along with Antarctica holds 98 per cent of the world's reserve of fresh water – now loses 100 to 150 cubic kilometres of ice every year, more than all the glacial ice in the Alps. And this scary statement is often repeated: If Greenland's ice cap were to melt completely, oceans would rise by seven metres, flooding New York and London and submerging island nations. While this could take centuries, global warming is heating the Arctic faster than anyplace else.
The global-warming spotlight has drawn a stream of high-profile tourists: U.S. House speaker Nancy Pelosi, U.S. senator and presidential candidate John McCain and European Commission president José Manuel Barroso. At the upscale, Scandinavian-style Hotel Arctic, I even run into Kevin O'Leary, the tough-talking businessman on the CBC reality-TV show Dragons' Den. He's here to shoot a Discovery Channel program called Ten Ways to Save the Planet, which follows experimental environmental ideas. O'Leary watched as a square acre-sized solar blanket was rolled out onto the icepack to slow the melting. (The blanket appears to work, he said, but the powerful reflection gave anyone walking on it an unusual sunburn – inside the nose.) Greenland tourism officials, however, are hoping to attract more than politicians and reality-TV stars to this Arctic island, where visitors can track herds of muskoxen, go dog sledding, watch the northern lights or visit Viking ruins. The country recently inked an agreement with a U.K. ad agency to help brand Greenland beyond “polar bears … and igloos.” Air Greenland, meanwhile, launched its first direct flights to the United States in late May – a five-hour flight from Baltimore, Md., to Kangerlussuaq, the island's international hub – with the hopes of attracting North American tourists. The number of visitors to this former Danish colony is rising.
More cruises are stopping. Still, only around 33,000 tourists visit each year, and on the jet from Baltimore, the plane is barely a quarter full. In Greenland, there's still plenty of elbow room.
I arrive in Kangerlussuaq in early July on a warm afternoon for a five-day visit. While a signpost outside the airport points out the flight times to Copenhagen, Los Angeles and the North Pole, the village of 500 comprises little more than the airport. (It's hard to imagine this place as the 8,000-strong U.S. Army base it began as during the Second World War.) After a short wait, I follow the passengers on to the runway to the cherry-red Dash-7 for the 45-minute flight to Ilulissat. With no connecting roads – there are only two stoplights in the whole country – travel is by air or boat.
