Zzzzzzz

by angieAtlasPosted on No Comments
Qassiisaq, Nunarsuit, near Kap Thorvaldsen, 8th July 2023

Anchored in an all but landlocked bay near Kap Thorvaldsen, our magical dwelling place for the past days, I sit on the foredeck with my breakfast musli bowl, listening to the snow buntings and Lapland longspurs offering their morning greetings to the sun. The tide is out and a strip of ochre-coloured seaweed glistens on the rocks in the intertidal zone — a space in between the low and high water mark, belonging fully neither to the sea nor to the land.

At ebb the seaweed makes a thick, soft carpet to step on when we land with the dinghy. A little attention never goes amiss when clambering onto land, for the shoots of the seaweed can be slick and slithery, sending a leg sliding into the water until the boots fill up.

At flood, we float through an astonishing forest garden of bewildering beauty. The light sparkles in the air globules clinging to the plants, sun beams filter through the canopy and the boundary dividing air and sea, and abounding animal life tend to their many affairs.

A large iceberg with two towers sails serenely past the entrance of our little fjord. Deep rumbling reaches my ear, interrupting the birdsong and the constant roar of the sea lapping the coast outside our bay. The sea’s sound reminds me of a mountain stream more than waves lapping ashore, and that’s with calm seas. I try to imagine the roar of a heaving storm surge hitting the coast.

Large icebergs collapse all around us, invisibly. Hidden by the rocky islands surrounding us, or around the corner in the next bay. Sounds travel far in the Arctic. It bounces and echos off the rock walls that tumble into the sea around us.

Pervading everything is the constant buzz and zzzzzz of the ever-present cloud of mosquitoes. They only ever really leave us alone out at sea — that is, if we haven’t scooped them all up in the boat before — or when sufficient wind picks up to pin them to the ground. When hiking, we often wear head nets to keep them from eating us alive. Having been in the tropics and the rainforest, this still feels a level up! There, the mosquitoes at least seem to stick to some kind of diurnal rhythm, whereas here, they are always awake and ready to sting. No moment is free of them.

I’m shrouded in a cloud of ‘the sons of devil’, as they are called here, and realise just too late that I left a little strip only covered by my sock between the shoes and the trousers available to them. By the time I notice the first sting, I have 10 on my feet and now they itch like mad, leaving me in half a mind to scratch the skin off my bones.

A recent memory surges up to my consciousness. During National Day in Qaqortoq, we joined the music festival, which took place in the local sports hall, which has all amenities one could wish for. We are sat among the locals, taking in the hum and our surroundings after watching the seals being butchered after the seal hunt race not half an hour before. Suddenly, we are stirred to our feet, transfixed by alluring voices. The local rock band has handed the stage to a pair of Inuit throat singers from Canada. The two of them are dressed in splendid traditional clothes rimmed with brilliant colours.

One of their songs tells of the sound of the mozzies circling around our heads. The days being rainy, cold and overcast when we arrived, we hadn’t had the ‘chance’ to experience this lunacy ourselves back then, but now I can fully relate.

The two ladies spin a sublime multilayered tapestry of sounds that enchants me. The unusual sounds of throat singing are so different to what my ears are accustomed to, so mysterious. Their songs capture acute observation and subtle attention to their natural surroundings, picking aspects in turn and transposing them into emblematic melodies. Other tunes tell of the meanderings of a river, and the flight of a Canada goose. In the past, Inuit women would gather when their men were out hunting, and sitting together, they’d spin songs that spring from their environment.

Back in the present, the iceberg has moved past the third of the four passages that lead into our anchorage. The sun is hot in a deep blue sky, but the little breeze that has sprung up is pure bliss. The others are still asleep down below. I’ll brew myself a coffee and jump onto the paddle board for a little exploring.

Angie

Milky air and chalky water

by angieAtlasPosted on No Comments
On passage to the ice shield to the East of Saattukujooq, 12th July 2023

Shredded veils of fog drift past like dense plumes of smoke easing off the hazy cloak ahead of us. Lifting from the water as if weightless, they rise steadily over craggy basalt outcrops inland. We are motoring through the narrow passage that cuts through the archipelago of thousands of islets, islands, and off-lying rocks inland of Kap Thorvaldsen. Leading us to the northern side of the cape, this branched fjord cuts deep into the landscape and is a protected shortcut to the North.

Only some 20 m wide at its smallest stretch, the tides run fast with up to 4 knots at times and create some interesting swirls in the water that take the bow of the boat around. We are near high water, so we avoid being centrifuged, chewed, and spat out through the narrow channel.

Once through the squeeze, the fjord opens to the west and the mist gets thicker. The air has a definite chill to it now, brought on by the vapour dissolved in the air. Soon, the radar picks up some sizeable bergs in the passage. A huge tilted table disgorges sheets of waterfalls at its lower end, the spray glittering in the rays that oozes through the mist. Soon after, an extraordinarily stunning caldera comes into view. Perfectly rounded, with precipitous cliffs veiled in mist, and a narrow entrance into an alluring pool of turquoise-coloured water. A single gull paddles peacefully about.

On reaching the other side, the wind drops from 25 to 4 knots and we are surrounded by a thick layer of fog in a calm sea. A few skittish guillemots hurriedly flap to get away from us. A slight swell runs, as if we were ‘sat on the chest of a giant softly breathing,’ as our friend Carl once said when being becalmed on the ocean. We feel catapulted back to our recent Atlantic crossing, when we saw not a thing but different shades of fog for over a week. Getting philosophical, we wondered if we were moving at all, and if so, if we were just turning in circles around our own axis. Are the past weeks’ memories of Greenland but dreams?

Sailing through uncharted waters with some soundings sprinkled decoratively on the chart, we thread our way through bergs and islands. Slowly the brume lifts as we are surrounded by more and more land, mountain peaks peek out on top, and the radiating heat burns away the straggling remainders of the vapour. We leave behind the last charted depths and advance with satellite imagery and the depth sounder.

We pass close to an islet with an eagle roost with two chicks. Alex spots the young spreading their wings tentatively in the emerging sun. How long until the fledglings will flee the nest?

In the distance, two long tongues of the tremendous ice shield reach down to meet the sea. This is where we are headed: for the reborn land underneath the glaciers, released by the retreat of the ice. The bedrock and the glacial flood plains crisscrossed by an intricate web of meandering milky streams laden with glacial flour — rocks crushed and ground into fine powder by the passage of the ice.

We are off the charts, without a doubt.

Angie

Diving with the ice

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Itilleq, Sunday, 25th June 2023

Minuscule air bubbles ascend in perfectly straight columns as if we were submerged in Champagne, with the sun reflecting from the top of each little sphere. When listening intently, we can hear the air stream, bubble after bubble released from its icy enclosure. We’re enveloped in azures, blues, cyans, turquoises and whites, ranging from intense colours to delicate pale tones.

We’re freediving in Greenland next to a bergy bit that has calved from the neighbouring iceberg not long ago. Grounded in the shallows of the sandy bay in a stunning side-fjord, it already gives shelter to fish hiding underneath. 

Light beams play and meander in the water, drawing patterns in the water column, the ice, the ground. They filter and focus through the waves as if someone were looking with searchlights. Plankton drifts by and catches the light. 

One of them catches my eye: a translucent ellipsoid with eight rows of combs along its body. It reminds me of an elongated stripy melon. The combs consist of tiny plates that act like prisms, diffracting light in iridescent waves of rainbow colours. These little comb jellies are called ctenophore, owing their name to the Greek words ctenos (‘comb’) and phoros (‘carrier’). The cells making up the plates share elements present in human cells. The pulsating movements and accompanying rainbow prism ripples rivet my attention.

Looking up, little highlights and sparks appear between the rays of light, where water droplets hit the surface above us and bounce back, sending ripples over the waves that soon lose themselves in the wavelets created by the wind. The ice is melting in the sun, eroding into organic shapes.

Melt and sea water swirl in tight pirouettes around the ice, embracing each another wildly, though staying separate. Two dancers in an intricate Tango Argentino. Our vision becomes blurred whenever we stir, as if looking into syrup water medley. There is a strong thermocline too; the water temperature changing dramatically with the depth, which acts similarly. At the surface, the water is about 8 °C, but further down it can be as little as 2 °C. When we keep still, current slowly displaces the twirls and we can see clearly again.

The intertidal belt is home to an abundant forest, consisting of what appears to be uncountable varieties underwater plants of many shapes, and hues of brown, amber, yellow, and startling green. Semi-transparent globules, fairy hair, grasses, bushes, thickets with fabulous names, bladder wrack, knotted wrack, rock weed, different sorts of brown algae. Layers of growth that remind me of descriptions of rainforest canopies, where rich ecosystems exist in each tree’s crown. Algae grows on seaweed, mussels hold on to branches, sea urchins clasp stalks, snails cling to leaves, worms climb stems, starfish hide in crevices, fish camouflage under foliage, big mussels rally in clusters on the ground. Diving through this dense forest feels like flying.

I return to the deeper area, where the bergy bit lies grounded. The ice crystals scatter the light in a dazzling splendour of reflections that keep me enthralled as I fin along the side of the berg. The ice is far from uniform, even this smallish chunk has a profusion of textures, opacities, crystals, shapes, colours. At one end, there is gin-clear section, translucent and barely visible in the water. Meltwater that had filled a crack and frozen anew into water ice. Its surface is curved and indented by little dimples and hollows like a golf ball, licked and melted by the sea water. Bubbles released from the white ice underneath rise through a gash in its middle. Only some edges catch the light — a frozen twin of the comb jelly. 

Diving along and across the ice, playing with the surfaces, watching the changing light, the interplay of water, air, light, melt and salt water, is addictive. We take turns diving down and watch out for one another. I’m mesmerised and keep circling the berg. Closing with the ice, we are conscious of the temperature difference and the water becomes decidedly less salty. Slowly, our toes begin to feel the cold and our fingertips do too.

We return to the paddle board for a break and to warm up. Tied to a hunk jutting out of the berg, it acts as our diving buoy and gear storage. We brought along insulated bottles filled to the brim with hot water that we pour into the socks and gloves. Pure bliss! The pain in the toes quickly gives way to feeling toasty once more as the body sends warm blood to our extremities. 

We decide to go for a paddle and a change of scenery. Both of us on our knees on the board, we take turns rowing towards the big iceberg. We learned to balance with both of us on the board when we were in the Caribbean, and increasingly used it as a fast replacement for the dinghy — rowed with two oars, it can be very fast. Today, we only have one with us. We keep our distance to the berg since any moment bits could break off and it could become unstable, rotate, break apart. Ice might not only fall in our heads, but also shoot up from below. 

’[…] what would seem to be static and immobile, can change all of a sudden. […] the change that you think is never going to come has been here and gone while you’ve been making that argument,’ Barry Lopez, a master writer, not only on nature and the Arctic, highlights in the book ‘Syntax of the River: The Pattern Which Connects’. Never has it been as clear to me as when being close to the ice and the rocks. Rock and ice seem utterly immobile to us and as if they always have been and always will be. But it’s just our attention span and our life times, our rate of change, that make it appear so. If we stop and watch, we can see the ice melting, rocks falling, and if we expand our time horizon a little more, we see them changing their shapes dramatically. 

As we pass, we watch a small ice piece in perpetual motion. It keeps rotating, never in balance. Waterfalls rush down over the edge of the overhanging cliff that the water surface carved into the sides of the berg. All around, melting drops splash on the water surface underneath, sending ripples in all directions. Two startling azure stripes cut diagonally through the ice — another crack filled with frozen meltwater. Is this where ‘our’ bergy bit has calved from?

A long tongue sticks out underneath the water surface, clearly visible as change in the water colour which suddenly shifts from dark petrol to a startling intense swimming-pool-turquoise. We paddle around it, keeping our offing. Nevertheless, we are on edge, we know that if a big piece calves now, it will be very interesting to say the least. We make our way around it, admiring its stark beauty and being intensely aware of how small we are compared to nature, and how things might change all of a sudden.