Today, we ventured west, bound for the eastern coast of Greenland. With our bearings set on Scoresbysund (the planet’s largest fjord system) we made progress through fluctuating fog which rises and falls like a gossamer curtain, draping us in whiteness before revealing a calm, grey sea once again.
Our day proceeded as such with little interruption until a call from the bridge announced an unexpected blue whale sighting. While relatively numerous on our trip so far, there is no excuse for passing up an opportunity to behold the planet’s largest animal. So, jacket-clad, we emptied onto open decks to take in not one, but perhaps up to three blue whales feeding in the calm, open water at the southern end of the Greenland Sea. While still 40 nautical miles from shore, any bathymetric chart of this area shows the continental shelf of east Greenland extending beneath our keel despite our distance from the mainland. Our large cetacean friends seemed to be working the edge of this drop-off, tracing random arcs at the divide between 1,000m (3,200ft.) and 3,000m (9,900ft.).
Seemingly preoccupied by having to fuel their hulking masses, we left these cetaceans to the task at hand but not before dropping a plankton tow into the water with hopes of collecting a little whale food. To our delight our sample was buzzing with life as copepods and amphipods (both small invertebrates one step up the food chain from photosynthetic algae) bounced around our Petri dish in a mad dash of activity. Life, as it seems, is alive and well off Greenland’s eastern coast.
Continuing west, a thin band of light slipped into view during a break in the fog. Nearly indistinguishable from grey sky, our initial glimpse of east Greenland began to take shape around 3pm. Folded into the horizon, the dark flanks of Scoresbysund emerged first, offset by the Rorschach remains of winter’s snowfall, to be followed eventually by a thin band of glacial ice underlining the skyline. Within two hours of this welcomed sight, we were at the 12-nautical-mile-wide entrance of this massive, flooded glacial valley with a sentinel of ice between us and the innards of the fjord system beyond. Emerging from the fog a lone, spire-like iceberg drifted motionless at the entrance, reaching just high enough into the low atmosphere to create its own, tiny microclimate overhead. Our approach and subsequent circumnavigation of the trip’s first substantially sized piece of ice lasted nearly 60 minutes, with a barrage of images to show for it.
Wait, wait! There’s more. A lot can happen in the land of the midnight sun and a post-dinner polar bear has just been added to the list of today’s sightings. Spotted at a distance into Scoresbysund, the initial sighting quickly became encased in fog, adding to the thrill of the hunt. Eventually a creamy yellow dot resolved through the haze and allowed us a respectable approach to this healthy animal. A cherry on top of a wonderful introduction to Greenland!
