Icebergs

You do know that you will always meet someone who is outdoing you. So far, this trip, that really hasn't happened, and everyone has been amazed at what I am doing. But it had to happen sometime, and today was it. There was this South Korean lady on our iceberg cruise. She did the cruise yesterday as well. She wanted to know what I was doing tomorrow. When she understood, she decided she would go to Disko island as well - despite it being an eight hour journey each way. When I asked how long she was in Greenland, she didn't know - her trip had already been 105 days, and she had been to France, Ireland, Iceland and Greenland. Iceland was good because there was something to do every night. I found out she had been on every tour on offer in ilulissat, and she had four more days. I might see her on the boat tomorrow.

There have been three different Inuit people's settle in the same site on this peninsula, so it is a particularly important prehistoric site. The area where the icebergs calve is also geographically significant, so it has been classified as a UNESCO World Heritage site. This morning I visited the Inuit site. It had snowed, so I'm sure I was the first to do so. It's definitely a pretty place.

Later, I went on the iceberg cruise. The glacier sends more icebergs than any other glacier in the world. Where they break off is about a km deep, but the mouth of the fjord is only 250m deep, so the icebergs all stop at the mouth until they have lost enough depth to go on. As they move down the fjord they also turn over, so they get smooth tops, and acquire dirty from the bottom of the fjord. Every large iceberg in the photos has more than 250m below the waterline, and roughly 50m above it. They were much taller, but in 2004, they became shorter. I saw the Inuit site from the sea, and the place where I'm staying.

The boat can only go where there is water between or in front of the icebergs, where they meet the bay, so you miss out on seeing the entire fjord where they are all jammed together after calving from the glacier. There is a walk beside the icebergs in the fjord before they reach the bay. To get to the icebergs you go across the tundra, and through a chasm. When I got back, I tried to walk to the icebergs, but I ran out of time to get there.