The Sermeq Kujalleq Glacier in Greenland can be seen calving

Dhe reading and arithmetic in school was not his thing, but Sune Jerimiassen, 25, is a virtuoso on the fjord. The winch rotates, the line whizzes, flat fish carcasses appear on the surface of the water. Sune reaches for the fish – some sea wolves, a lot of cod, but mostly black halibut – and pulls the hook out of their mouths before throwing them into a vat behind him.

It’s as fast as a cone player. It is a mystery how Sune manages to prevent the hook from slipping through his glove into his finger during the hours of fast-paced work.

Henrik, 14, Sune’s little brother, can hardly keep up with cutting out the mesentery. So he has no view of the magnificent panorama: The fishing dinghy is at the exit of the Ilulissat ice fjord, in which the ice of the Sermeq Kujalleq glacier provides new spectacles hour after hour: He calves icebergs without ceasing.

Every second tourist who travels to Greenland flies to Illulissat, the home port of Sune and Henrik at the exit of the fjord, because of the ice fjord.

Icebergs in all shapes and sizes

Some icebergs lie flat and long in the water like a festival table, some stretch to a point like the Matterhorn, some have cavities, gnawed by streams of meltwater, as large as the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

If you could heave individual icebergs ashore, some would be as high as the peaks of German low mountain ranges – 900 meters. Although 90 percent of the ice mass is hidden under water, the larger blocks protrude as far out of the sea as the Elbphilharmonie over the Hamburg harbor.

Again and again the glacier calves ice into the water

Source: Jens V. Nielsen

The front of the glacier is 55 kilometers inside the fjord, a seven kilometer long frozen wall. With a crash, the Sermeq Kujalleq calves its ice in the fjord. The pressure of the inland ice, which is up to three kilometers thick, pushes it into the fjord at 40 meters per day. No other ice flow in the northern hemisphere is as fast.

This is how the visitor finds out in the Eisfjordcenter, the new information center. It was designed and furnished by the Danish star architect Dorte Mandrup to provide information about nature, culture and economy in Ilulissat in a sensual way. Only opened in July, the house is already considered by many Greenlanders to be the most beautiful building on the island: like a gigantic boomerang, the triangular glass and wood pavilion lies flat on the edge of the Icefjord, which has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2004.

Greenland is a land of fishermen

Through the panoramic windows the view falls over the tundra in summer and over snowfields in winter, behind which the icebergs drift in the fishing grounds of the fishermen. And with a bit of luck, the northern lights shine in the sky at night.

Around half of Greenland’s national budget is made up of subsidies from Denmark. The money that Greenland earns from exports comes almost exclusively from fishing. Accordingly, the coat of arms of the municipality of Avanaata, to which Ilulissat belongs, shows a black halibut next to four sled dogs.

The place Ilulissat in Greenland

The place Ilulissat in Greenland

Source: Jeppe Kjær

10,700 people live in this huge administrative unit, which encompasses the entire north-west of Greenland and is larger than Germany, Austria and Switzerland combined. The whole of Greenland has only 58,000 inhabitants and 27,000 employees. Around 1000 of them cruise with their nutshells between the icebergs to catch flatfish every day.

The center of the fishery is Ilulissat – the Greenlandic word means “icebergs”, earlier the place was called Jakobshavn. The third largest city in Greenland has 4670 inhabitants and 3108 dogs. On the city map there are hatched areas around the built-up areas, these are the dog places where the fishermen and catchers keep their workhorses on fallow land.

Angela Merkel saw traces of climate change

Somewhere in Ilulissat a dog is always howling, the neighboring dogs join in, it is a constant crooked concert that belongs to the city like church bells to Europe. In winter, fishermen take their dog sledges out to sea for ice fishing.

Even if consumers in Germany cannot know whether the fish fillet on their plate has passed through Sune’s hands, they have probably already seen photos of his workplace. In the summer of 2007, the images went around the world of the then “Climate Chancellor” in a red anorak being sailed through the Ilulissat Fjord. “This is where climate change becomes visible, indeed tangible,” said Angela Merkel at the time. “We have to go ahead to stop what humankind is doing to global warming.”

Fantastic natural cinema: icebergs drifting past the Ilulissat Fjord

Fantastic natural cinema: icebergs drifting past the Ilulissat Fjord

Source: Bernd Hauser

In the 14 years since Merkel’s visit, the Sermeq Kujalleq has doubled its speed, which scientists see as a sign of global warming. The glacier calves 40 to 50 cubic kilometers of ice into the fjord every year – that’s 100 to 126 million tons every day. The glacier releases ten percent of all icebergs in Greenland into the sea.

The largest take two to three years to melt away. They drift far, some as far as Ireland and Newfoundland. The “Titanic” probably also collided with an iceberg that began its voyage in the Ilulissat Fjord.

A house like the wings of an owl

This is how you read it in the exhibition at the Icefjord Center, whose architect Dorte Mandrup says she was inspired “by the wings of a snowy owl as it flies over the fell”. The house, which was mainly financed by the non-profit organization Realdania, cost 20 million euros, and the Greenlanders are proud of it.

Thousands of visitors have come since the opening, cruise tourists, citizens of Ilulissat, international scientists. The first locals have already been married on the walkable roof in their national costume, the bride in high fur boots and a red top set with glass beads, the groom in fur trousers and anorak.

The visitor center turns its glass front towards the glacier

The visitor center turns its glass front towards the glacier

Source: Realdania

The first room you enter is filled with hiking boots. “When you come into a house in Greenland, you take off your shoes,” says director Elisabeth Momme, “that’s also a must in the visitor center.” takes time for the exhibition, ”says Momme.

This is a kind of cabinet of curiosities and consists mainly of hand-blown glass sculptures that are modeled on icebergs. Objects have melted into them: a walrus tooth, a harpoon point made from reindeer antlers, driftwood from the ice, two and a half million years old. The well-prepared information on this can be found in volumes in front of the windows.

The oldest signs of pollution

The heart of the exhibition are the cooled cores from boreholes from the inland ice. The climate history of the past can be read in them, because the composition of the oxygen isotopes in Greenland’s ice sheet, which is up to 3000 meters thick, is related to the temperature that prevailed in the atmosphere when the snow fell before it slowly condensed into ice with new layers of snow would.

The history of mankind is also reflected in the ice. For example, there is an increased concentration of lead and silver in the layers that formed around the turn of the times up to 180 AD: In the “Pax Romana”, the most stable phase of the Roman Empire, ores of these metals were built on a larger scale and melted them down.

The exhibits in the center tell the history of the earth

The exhibits in the center tell the history of the earth

Source: Realdania

Many particles were released into the atmosphere – it is the first sign of human pollution that can be read in the ice sheet. On the other hand, one can observe in the uppermost layers of the ice that environmental protection is working: The lead concentration has fallen since 1970, when US President Nixon signed the “Clean Air Act”.

Karl Elias Guldager, 50, is more concerned about warming than about heavy metals: “We are noticing climate change, very much so,” says the fisherman and hunter at his dog park on the outskirts of the city. Like his ancestors hundreds of years ago, he always goes dog sledding out onto the sea ice in winter. 20 years ago this was possible until the end of May. “In 2021 we had to give up ice fishing over two months earlier.”

There is whale meat in the supermarket

Sune, the young fisherman, no longer has dogs like the old people. Keeping the animals is too difficult for him, he says. In winter he hunts from a boat in Disko Bay. The killing of reindeer, musk ox and ptarmigan on land and seals and whales at sea is the basis of Greenlandic culture, in every supermarket you can buy guns and cartridges – and whale meat. Perhaps the hunt for marine mammals is not frowned upon today because it is strictly regulated by state quotas.

When Sune and his brother come back to port four hours later, they have 500 kilograms of black halibut on board. A crane lifts the catch onto the quay of the fish factory where it is processed for export. How this abundance of fish can be explained, the visitors also learn in the ice fjord center: The melting icebergs create turbulence and thus bring nutrient-rich water up from the depths. In spring, sunlight penetrates through the thinning sea ice, and algae bloom underneath.

Copepods and krill graze on it in immeasurable numbers and make the fjord a gourmet paradise for the fish. Much to the delight of Sune and his colleagues, but also to the delight of German consumers: In the supermarket, the “fillets of black halibut, practically boneless” cost 7.99 euros in a 360-gram package.

The boomerang-shaped building blends in with the surrounding landscape

The boomerang-shaped building blends in with the surrounding landscape

Source: Realdania

Tips and information

How to get there

Flight to Copenhagen. From there Air Greenland flies to Kangerlussuaq Airport, onward flight with the propeller plane to Ilulissat in 45 minutes.

Where do you live well?

In the “Hotel Icefiord” the icebergs pass in front of the windows, the glass fronts of which face the water (double room / breakfast from 230 euros, hotelicefiord.com). In the “Hotel Hvide Falk” (“White Falcon”), a double room / breakfast costs from 130 euros. In summer there is a Greenlandic buffet with crabs, fish, home-smoked musk ox, reindeer and whale bacon (hotelhvidefalk.gl).

Around the ice fjord

The Icefjord Center (isfjordcentret. gl) costs 20 euros admission, the exhibition is open all year round (winter break in January). In summer you can book a boat trip into the mouth of the Icefjord for 74 euros – magical with the midnight sun (ilulissattours.com). Fishing trips in the Icefjord are also possible (diskolineexplorer.com/en).

We recommend the well-marked hiking trails to the World Heritage Site on the edge of the Icefjord, which start at the center of the Icefjord. Don’t leave the path: when large icebergs break off or spin, tidal waves can wash over the coast.

Participation in the trip was supported by Visit Greenland and Realdania. You can find our standards of transparency and journalistic independence at www.axelspringer.com/de/werte/downloads

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