They all turned to Jeremy, who averted his gaze and then glanced down at his computer, then looked Costas full in the face. He paused for a moment before speaking, his tone oddly troubled. “You’re probably right. But that may only be part of the story.”
At that moment the pilot’s voice came over the cabin speakers to announce that they were beginning their descent into Kangerlussuaq, the former US air base that now served as Greenland’s main international hub on the west coast. Jack looked out his window and saw that they had crossed the edge of the Greenland ice cap and were now approaching the Davis Strait, the wide channel of ocean between western Greenland and the Canadian Arctic. Below them lay sinuous fjords and expanses of green that suddenly made the Viking settlement of these shores seem plausible, an inconceivable thought on the barren east coast. As the aircraft banked sharply and turned back east they came in line with the longest inlet of them all, Sondre Stromfjord, with the bleak and sparse settlement of Kangerlussuaq scattered over the valley at its head. A few minutes later the undercarriage dropped and Jack could make out two aircraft parked in bays of the former military airfield in the centre of the valley, the first an Antonov An-74 transport jet which had preceded them with Costas’ precious gear and the second a Lynx helicopter bearing the distinctive logo of the International Maritime University.
“We’re coming over the icefjord now. Take a look out to port and you’ll see the tips of icebergs through the mist.”
James Macleod took his hand momentarily off the cyclic and pointed past Jack at the jagged pinnacles of white that appeared like peaks of distant mountains through the clouds. In the passenger compartment behind them, Maria and Jeremy leaned forward to follow his gaze. With the three-hour time difference from England it was still early morning, and the sun had yet to burn off the sea mist caused as the cold air tumbled off the ice cap and met the warmer air rising from the sea. In the summer sun it was actually warmer at three thousand feet than on the surface of the ice cap, but even so the temperature was a few degrees below zero and they all wore fully insulated flight suits as well as helmets, a precaution against turbulence as the helicopter encountered thermal updraughts over exposed land and water along the coastline.
“We’ve got fifteen minutes until the helipad’s clear. Time for a quick sightseeing tour.”
Macleod had met them on the tarmac at Kangerlussuaq and had escorted them straight to the waiting Lynx helicopter. It had taken them just under an hour to fly due north to the Ilulissat icefjord, on Greenland’s west coast, almost a hundred and sixty miles north of the Arctic Circle. They had been following a heavy Chinook transport helicopter, based out of the remaining US air base in Greenland at Thule, a welcome part of the US government’s contribution to the IMU project. Costas had decided to fly in the Chinook to oversee the transfer of his equipment, and Jack could imagine the other man’s gnawing anxiety as he sat in the loading bay watching the fruit of months of labour suspended in a cargo net above the void. Now Jack and Macleod watched as the Chinook descended into the sea mist at the head of the fjord.
“This is where the iceberg came from that sank the Titanic,” Macleod said, his thick Glaswegian brogue enhanced by the intercom. “It’s one of the fastest-moving glacial ice streams in the world.” He swung the helicopter round to the east, facing inland, and flew at maximum speed for a few minutes until they had cleared the mist and could see the Greenland ice cap rising ahead of them in a vast stark dome. “The Ilulissat glacier’s the main pressure outlet for the ice cap, where the glacier flows down to discharge ice into the sea. You can see where the ice floe begins now.”
Macleod worked the controls and swung the Lynx in a wide arc back towards the sea. As they peered out they could see where the seamless undulations of the ice cap began to fracture and crenellate, forming a corrugated flow that seemed to ripple off towards the west.
“Believe it or not, that thing’s flowing at an incredible rate, almost eight miles a year,” Macleod said. “The crevasses are caused by the pressure of the glacier as it moves against the bedrock, in places almost three thousand feet below. It’s like a river flowing through rapids. And now for the fun part.”
He dipped the nose of the helicopter and they were suddenly hurtling towards the glacier, its fractured surface looming up at them in gigantic folds and fissures. At what seemed like the last moment Macleod levelled out, and almost immediately they were enveloped in sea mist, the glacier only fleetingly visible as the rotor swirled away the mist to reveal patches of white and yawning crevasses of deep blue.
“We’re actually more than five hundred feet above the glacier,” Macleod reassured them. “Remember how huge those features are.” For a few minutes he flew by instruments alone as they continued to hurtle through the mist, and then he eased back on the cyclic and dropped down until the altimeter read only two hundred and fifty feet above sea level. “Here we are.”
As he brought the Lynx to a hover the mist parted and a spectacular image materialised before their eyes. It was a vast wall of ice, towering almost as high as the helicopter and extending on either side as far as they could see. Rather than a sheer face of compacted ice, it was a fragmented mass of towers and canyons, fissured with streaks of blue where meltwater had flowed down from the surface and frozen again. The whole mass looked unbelievably fragile and precarious, as if the slightest nudge would bring it all cascading down.
“The leading edge of the glacier,” Macleod announced. “Or rather the mass of icebergs that have sheared off it and jammed up the head of the fjord. The edge of the glacier itself is more than five nautical miles east of us towards the ice cap, back the way we came.”
“It’s awesome.” Jeremy’s voice came cracking over the intercom, and for once he seemed at a loss for words. “So this is where the North Atlantic icebergs come from?”
“Ninety per cent of them,” Macleod replied. “Twenty billion tons every year, enough to affect global sea levels. That wall of ice may seem pretty static, but it’s sped up recently and is actually moving towards us at nearly fifteen feet an hour. Some of the large bergs will be pushed out more or less intact, but almost all of them calve, producing smaller bergs and vicious little slabs called growlers. Almost ten thousand big bergs make it out of the fjord every year into Disko Bay. They process anti-clockwise with the current around Baffin Bay and then float as far south as the Grand Banks of Newfoundland and as far east as Iceland.”
“One of them’s calving now,” Jack said suddenly.
Without warning a vast slab of ice had cracked off the precipice immediately in front of them, the wrenching noise audible even above the din of the helicopter’s rotor. The slab of ice slipped straight down into the water and disappeared completely, then erupted upwards almost to its full height before settling down again, bobbing up and down until only a jagged pinnacle was visible above the slurry of ice fragments in front of the bergs.
“I see what they mean about icebergs being mostly underwater,” Jeremy said, his tone still awestruck. “The bigger ones must scrape along the bottom of the fjord.”
“That’s exactly what happens. Sometimes they drag along the sea floor, sometimes they tumble over.” Macleod flipped down a small video screen from the cockpit ceiling and tapped a keyboard, revealing an image of the fjord bathymetry.