David Gibbins - Crusader Gold, Ilulissat icefjord, Greenland

Crusader Gold photo essay: Ilulissat icefjord, Greenland

David Gibbins

One of the most stupendous sights I have ever seen is the Ilulissat icefjord in western Greenland, the setting for some extraordinary drama in my novel Crusader Gold. The photos below were taken during an expedition to Greenland in June 2004. We approached the fjord in the Russian research vessel Akademik Ioffe, then explored the ice close-up in Zodiacs. The images you see here are not of the glacier itself, which lies almost 40 kilometres down the fjord, but are giant icebergs which have broken off the glacier and come to ground on Isfjeldbanken, ‘Icefjord bank’, an underwater ridge at the entrance to the fjord. Once free, the bergs head out to sea and are pushed by the current around Baffin Bay, and into the north Atlantic – the berg that sank Titanic very probably came from Ilulissat. These pictures speak for themselves, but the figures are astounding: every year the glacier calves some 35 million tons of ice, enough to supply New York City or London with fresh water. In the last decade the glacier has receded dramatically, one of the clearest indications of climate change in the Arctic, though as these pictures show the quantity of ice being discharged remains staggeringly high.

This and the following two photos show a line of immense icebergs grounded on the Isfjeldbanken, the underwater ridge across the entrance to the icefjord. This is the scene that confronts Jack in my novel as he contemplates a dive like no other he has ever undertaken. The calm in these pictures is deceptive – at any moment one of these bergs might calve a giant slab of ice, or the entire berg itself might tumble over the bank towards the open sea. Up to seven-eights of these bergs lie submerged, an indication of the enormous depths of water beneath us in these photos – the ridge itself lies about 600 feet deep, but inside the fjord the bank drops off to more than 4,500 feet. The freezing darkness of these depths, with giant bergs tumbling and scraping overhead, is surely one of the most forbidding places on earth, and remains almost totally unexplored.

Iceberg, Ilulissat icefjord. Streaks of sediment can be seen on the top of some bergs where they have scraped along the seafloor after tumbling, and then righted themselves again; in other cases, the dirt is sediment blown on top of the glacier. This berg, a veritable ice palace more than 50 feet high, retains much of the jagged and fractured appearance of the glacier front. The sculpted look of icebergs at sea represent months of water and wind erosion, and repeated tumbling.

Iceberg, Ilulissat icefjord. The white ice of these bergs dates from the last ice age, some of it 100,000 years old; the white colour is trapped air bubbles, which preserve an exact record of atmospheric conditions far back into prehistory. The blue streaks visible in some bergs are meltwater ice, resulting from ice on the surface of the glacier melting in the summer sun and then freezing up again to form translucent or clear ice in fissures and crevasses.

In Crusader Gold, the Zodiacs negotiate a sea full of dangerous ice fragments, ‘brash’, just as in this picture. The brash here is fresh-water ice from the glacier and the bergs, though in winter it is sealed in by sea-ice, frozen seawater. We watched a ‘growler’ – an unstable slab of ice the size of a house that began rocking too and fro, and then tipped over. The fjord is dangerous not only by boat, but also on land – a collapsing wall of ice or rolling berg can create a tidal wave up to ten metres high as it reaches shallow water, sweeping anyone along the shoreline to their death.

A view of the icefjord from Kælingekløften, ‘Suicide Gorge’, where Inuit people close to death would come to jump into the frigid waters below. The huge icebergs are grounded on Isfjeldsbanken, the underwater ridge which the bergs must scrape and roll over to reach the open sea. The glacier that produces the bergs lies some 40 kilometres down the fjord, to the left in this picture. Images of the Norse wolf-god Fenrir figure in my novel, and the baying of dogs is ever-present at Ilulissat. Only the Greenlandic sled dog - one of the closest dog breeds to wolf - can be kept north of the Arctic Circle; other breeds are not allowed for fear of interbreeding. Young dogs like this one run free, but as adults they are worked as sled dogs during the winter and chained up during the summer, and after only a few years when they become unable to work any longer they are shot.

In Crusader Gold, Seaquest looms out of the mist beyond the icebergs, just as Akademk Ioffe does in this picture.

The two pictures above, taken north of Ilulissat, show bergs that have broken free from the icefjord and are floating in the open ocean. They are being pushed by the current in an anti-clockwise route around Baffin Bay, and may eventually reach the north Atlantic. Almost two years after taking these pictures I stood at the northern tip of Newfoundland, at the Viking site of L’Anse aux Meadows, and watched a grounded iceberg which could well have come from Ilullissat - it could even have been one of these. You can tell the berg in the upper picture is relatively fresh because the ice is still jagged and irregular, not yet smoothed by wind and water. The huge ‘tabular’ berg in the lower picture, at least half a kilometre across, helped to inspire my image of the iceberg that plays a dramatic role in Crusader Gold.

The Kingiqtorsoaq runestone, a polished chip of quartz-slate measuring some 10 by 3.5 cm, on display in the excellent museum at Upernavik some 300 miles north of the Ilulissat icefjord. The runestone was found almost 200 years ago on the nearby island of Kingigtorsoaq beside three small cairns, similar to the cairns I photographed in Newfoundland at the Viking site of L’Anse aux Meadows. The inscription can be translated as ‘Ehrling Sighvatsson and Bjarni Thordarson and Endridi Oddsson on the Saturday before Rogation Day raised these cairns and cleared …’, followed by the six mysterious runes you can see here, never satisfactorily interpreted. Instead of ‘cleared’ that final word may mean ‘runed’, suggesting the stone was some form of apotropaic magic. The date has been calculated as 24 April 1333. Were these hunters in the Nordrsetr, the ‘northern hunting grounds’ of the Norse, perhaps trapped by sea ice at the end of the season and forced to survive a winter on the island? Or were they explorers, seeking a route to new lands at a time when the Norse settlements in Greenland were in decline? Soon after this date all European contact with the Norse Greenlanders was lost, and they vanish from history.

The coast of Greenland north of Ilulissat, near Upernavik. These forbidding shores would have held few attractions for Norse settlers, as meadowland for pasturage is only found in the south of Greenland. But in 2004 we went ashore and examined several places frequented by the Inuit, and I felt certain we were standing on sites used as seasonal camps by Norse hunters, men like Ehrling and Bjarni and Endridi on the Kingiqtorsoaq runestone. Further north and west, a scattering of Norse artefacts has been found in the Canadian Arctic, some probably taken by Inuit from abandoned Norse settlements in Greenland, but some undoubtedly representing Norse landfall and exploration. Huge questions still remain. Did the Norse discover the north-west passage? Is that where the last Viking settlers in Greenland went?

This scene, as we sailed away from Greenland into the sea-mist, inspired my vision of Jack at the end of Crusader Gold standing by the stern rail of Seaquest, holding an extraordinary artefact and contemplating an adventure that had taken him beyond anything he had ever experienced before as a diver or an archaeologist.

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