Kong Oscar Fjord, Northeast Greenland
Today we entered our second huge fjord system in Northeast Greenland, having sailed north from Scorsbysund during the night. Of course, there was no night in the usual sense since we are in 24 hours of daylight here at 74º N. We entered Kong Oscar Fjord and sailed up to Antarctica Sound. These names came from a Swedish-Norwegian expedition which visited this area in 1899. We then entered Franz Josephs Fjord, named by two German expeditions in 1868-1870. All along the walls of the fjords we were overwhelmed by the striking geology. Kilometer after kilometer of vertical cliffs exposed hundreds of meters of stratified rocks. These rocks are of Ordovician and Silurian age, 490-416 million years old and were folded during the Caledonian orogeny which extended from 490 to 390 million years ago, but they are not as highly metamorphosed as most of the Caledonian rocks which we saw earlier in Norway.
This entire area is part of the largest national park in the world. Although Inuit hunting is allowed, there is very little human activity here and the animals, especially the musk ox we have seen, are quite unconcerned with our presence. At this point in our voyage we are as far from any sort of vestige of civilization as we can get, and we are truly having a wilderness experience of the finest sort.
In the afternoon, we made a landing at a lovely little bay, Blomsterbugten (Flower Bay), named by Norwegian trappers and hunters who built a series of small huts along this part of the coast in the late 1920s and early 1930s in the hope of claiming this part of Greenland for Norway. We walked ashore and visited the small hut. We then walked inland to a small lake and had a chance to observe the rocks at close range.
After dinner we sailed up Nordfjord to the Waltershausen Glacier and cruised along the glacier face. It was a perfect ending to a perfect (though from a solar perspective, endless) day here in the Heart of the Arctic.
