Ilulissat Icefjord is a 55-kilometre channel on the west coast of Greenland packed solid with icebergs, fed by the fastest-moving glacier on Earth, and it lies a short walk from the town of Ilulissat. The glacier, Sermeq Kujalleq, moves tens of metres a day and calves more ice than any other outside Antarctica; the bergs it drops drift down the fjord until they run aground on a shallow bar at its mouth, where the biggest of them sit for months, jammed together, before breaking up and floating out into Disko Bay. A boardwalk from the town leads across the tundra to the Sermermiut cliffs, and there the whole fjord opens below you as a field of white and blue ice, some pieces the size of buildings, all of it slowly grinding. The cliffs were not empty ground before the boardwalk: people lived at Sermermiut for 4,000 years, and the remains of their settlement lie under the grass beside the trail.
The other way to see the ice is from among it. Boats go out from the harbour into Disko Bay and thread the calm channels between bergs that dwarf the deck, some smooth, some carved into arches and towers, all of them able to roll over without warning once they have melted enough, which is why the boats keep their distance. From late May to late July the sun never sets. It circles low through the small hours and lights the ice pink, gold and blue at what should be midnight, and this is when the fjord is busiest and the bergs at their largest. Humpback whales feed among the ice from April to the end of September, and in spring bowheads pass through the bay. In winter the sun disappears for weeks and the fjord goes silent under the northern lights. The ice you watch here fell as snow on Greenland thousands of years ago, and this fjord is where it finally reaches the sea.