Day 6 - Iluissat August 27, 2026

I’m pretty sure today sets a record for the number of pictures I’ve posted in a single day -  144, if the Internet gods treat me well. If a picture’s worth 1,000 words, we’re talking War and Peace. (Not really, War and Peace has 587,287 words, but you get my drift.) Flip through them quickly.

But what Jon giveth, Jon taketh away. I don’t have much to write tonight, no culture, no Inuits, hardly any history. Today was all ice (and a bird or two).

We arrived at Iluissat which, with a population of just over 5,000, is the third largest city in Greenland. According to Wikipedia, it has more Greenlandic dogs than people (we saw quite a few today). Tourism is its biggest industry, but fishing has been its historical mainstay.

Tourism is big because Iluissat sits at the end of the Ilussat Icefjord, the Northern Hemisphere’s most productive glacier, spewing out icebergs of a size that boggles the mind. We’ve seen ‘em in Alaska, Antarctica and other places, but nothing like this. That’s why there’s so many pictures tonight.

The reason it’s so productive – 46 cubic kilometers, or 11 cubic miles of ice per day – is that it’s the fastest moving – 40 meters or 131 feet per day.

We took a 2.5 hour boat ride this morning through the ice field and visited Iluissat and the Iluissat Icefjord Visitors Center this afternoon. The Visitor Center is why Iluissat is so popular. Someone said they expect 90 cruise boats this year. There were three today. The Visitor Center has a half-mile boardwalk that leads to a point with a view of the glacial face. There were beautiful Arctic wildflowers growing in the permafrost.

Oh, and one historical thing. The onboard historian gave a talk about Lief Errickson and the Viking/Norse settlement in Greenland. I won’t bore you with all that. But he did speculate on the reasons the Vikings disappeared by 1500. Starvation, a mini-ice age, fighting with the Inuits and simple drifting away back to Europe to fill the gaps in population caused by the Black Death of the 1300s. No one knows for sure; drifting away is the leading theory but it probably is a combination of all those factors. Our friend Tina’s oral history passed down from her ancestors – a war between the parties – remains in the running.

That wasn’t so bad, was it?

UUmmannaq tomorrow. (If you try to spell a Greenlandic word, doubling consonants and throwing in q’s – no u needed and a few u’s not following q’s is a good starting point.)