Greenland is so big! Its fjords extend hundreds of km inland. All up they cover an area of close to 40,000 sq km - absolutely mind boggling (just by way of comparison Sydney Harbour is around 60 sq km). Our first venture into these amazingly vast glacial water systems was at the Keyser Franz Joseph and the Kong Oscar fjords. Stunning!
After a few days exploring there, we headed south to Scoresbysund; the overnight trip down the east coast through open sea was a tad rough. We knew when we finally turned west into that giant fjord - the rocking and rolling eased up!
Scoresby Sund is the world’s largest fjord system - you could get totally swallowed up in there and never be seen again. Or so it seemed to me. We explored just a tiny fraction of its labyrinth of wriggly, almost hidden, fjords venturing only onto a couple of major ones.
As we sailed in and out of fjords we were surrounded by magnificent land formations. Rocky mammoths billions of years old in glorious technicolour. Bare rock thrust skywards and folded, uplifted and eroded. In amongst that grandeur, and helping to reshape the landscape, huge glaciers grind ever downwards to eventually lose face at the waters edge. And when I say lose face I mean humongous blocks of ice thundered into the water. Awesome!
The ice cap oozes down like runny icing!
The weather was perfect - the water still and the air pearly.
This was pretty awesome glacier. It is receding and the waters in front of it are shallow but still it was quite intimidating and not a little bit scary as our driver took us uncomfortably close to the face.
We followed a water flow from glacial melt back behind that same glacier to its terminal moraine! That was an amazing and dwarfing experience. Here one of our guides is checking his gun for the landing party - even if you don't see them, there are polar bears on the roam.
That’s a river of ‘chocolate milk’ flowing out from under the glacier picking up pulverised rock from the moraine which is the huge mound behind it, actually surround the stream. That mound is frozen pulverised rock.
The ‘delta’ of this glacier, or rather the melt from the terminal moraine of this glacier, was boot-sucking mud.
You really have to be there to understand - or actually not understand - the huge mounds of totally pulverised mountain that these glaciers create, carry along and finally deposit. I tried climbing this but it was a bit like a steep rocky sand dune collapsing at every step. A number of people slipped. I perched halfway up and studied the rocks.
There are at least three glaciers 'tumbling' down between these jagged peaks. You can see how much crunched up rock-mountain they carry. Mind boggling!
It's difficult to get a fix on the size of these peaks, but zoom in around centre pic and that small dark splotch is a zodiac full of expeditioners near the edge of the gravel scree which incidentally is ice underneath. The magnitude is almost beyond comprehension!
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