Arctic Land and Ice

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Icebergs come in many sizes and shapes. The largest are tabular icebergs. They're like flat-topped mountains. Medium icebergs are called berggie bits. Little pieces under a meter high are called brash. When brash reaches the shore, as in the last picture, it may lodge in the sand and melt into mushroom-like shapes. Larger icebergs may run aground or drift for years. About 70-90% of an iceberg is under water. Notice the lines cutting across bergs at various angles. They're caused by sea water washing against the berg, cutting a waterline, then the berg rebalancing itself to a new position as it melts, and the water cutting a new waterline. This can happen many times as a berg melts. The vertical fluting is caused by melting and runoff. It's like hillside erosion. Offshore oil platforms have people constantly tracking icebergs. If the berg is coming too close, they will tow them away.

For ships traveling in the Arctic, ice is serious and dangerous business. Ships in a fog used to have to come to a complete stop and drift to avoid hitting icebergs. Today, with radar, they still have to slow down. Picking places to go the Arctic is subject to where the ice is. The Hudson Strait was choked with ice, preventing our ship from getting to Churchill to pick us up, so they had to take the ship to Labrador and fly us there to meet it. That completely changed our itinerary. Crucial to planning a new itinerary, our ship got repeated, faxed, ice "egg code" reports. The egg code tells how old the ice is, what kind it is, how thick, how it's moving, and all kinds other details. Check out the ice egg code at http://www.natice.noaa.gov/

The Kangia glacier at Ilulissat. We hiked a mile or two to the glacier, seeing it at first like white mountains in the distance.

The glacier in the Evigheds Fjord. Old ice has been compressed, making it denser, so it refracts light differently and appears turquoise. Ice was continually breaking off and floating by.

With little vegetation in Greenland, geological structures are plainly visible. After the lighter gray mass of this rock formed, a darker molten rock intruded up along cracks and cooled, making what are called "dikes." The dikes are probably a granite gneiss with little quartz in it. 

The Greenland icecap at Itivdleq. In the foreground is tundra so lumpy it's hard to walk on. In the background is the gray-looking Greenland icecap, seen closer in the second picture. It's gray because the ice cap is a huge moving glacier that scrapes and pulverizes the bedrock under it into a fine, stone flour. The flour washes out from under the icecap in streams. Along the streams form sand, gravel and flour banks. The flour turns rivers and even the ocean at the mouth of rivers a milky color. When conditions are dry, the wind picks up the flour and blows it back onto the icecap, making it gray.

Glacial flour forms beaches like this one with a coating of pebbles on top. If you step in the same place up and down for less than a minute, it mushes into a cement-like quicksand. Glacial flour kills several people a year in Canada. They drive way out when the tide's low, their vehicle gets stuck, they try to push it, they get stuck, then the tide comes in and they drown.

Greenland gets a lot of fog, beautiful clouds and dramatic lighting. All these skies can be seen in as little as a single day. It was July. The sun never set. It goes downward until about 1:30 AM, then starts back up again.

The tundra is thick and varied. Over 2000 species of plants live in the Arctic. They usually have names like "Arctic," Dwarf," "Least," "Labrador," or "Lapland" -something. They're usually no more than ankle high. The first picture is Arctic Cotton. It was used as lamp wicks. The second is Pixie Cup lichen. The last two are seaweeds.