I cebergs have more in common with Instagram than you might expect. With both, what you see is only 10 per cent of what’s really there. For every towering wall of blue-tinged ice, every Viennetta-slab of pristine, swirly white, every pebble-dashed shard scraped from the base of a glacier floating on top of the frigid waters, there’s a far larger monolith, lurking beneath the surface.
Greenland , the vast island with two-thirds of its landmass above the Arctic Circle, is one of the very best places in the world to see icebergs. Head to the Ilulissat Icefjord – a Unesco World Heritage Site on the country’s crenellated west coast – and you can’t move for the things. This is the home of Sermec Kujalleq, one of the fastest moving and most active glaciers in the world, which calves a hard-to-comprehend 35km cubed of ice into the sea each year.
The view from my window at the town’s Hotel Arctic; multiple icebergs. Scattered across the bay as I walked the winding, wind-blown trails that snake around the fjord; myriad icebergs. And when taking a small boat ride between Ilulissat and the tiny village of Ilimanaq; a veritable gridlock of icebergs, through which our craft had to slalom and sometimes nudge our way.
So if icebergs are on your to-see list, go to Greenland. The only more-productive glaciers in the world are in Antarctica, and – for those of us living in the northern hemisphere – that’s significantly harder to reach, requiring flights right to Argentina �.
