Floe State?

The mood on the Sea Adventurer’s bridge was grim. “She’s only making eight knots,” said our expedition leader. “We need to hit at least fourteen to keep to our itinerary.” We were four days into a two-week sailing and anchored off Ilulissat, near a UNESCO World Heritage site nestled into the crenellated western coast of Greenland.

Earlier that day, I had found myself at the helm of a Zodiac, manoeuvring the rubberized craft through thick fog, near-freezing water, and growlers. The ten high-paying passengers under my care likely had no idea that this was my first trip with the tour operator or my first time north of the Arctic Circle.

“Can you handle an outboard?” my new employer had asked me. I assured him that I could. Five minutes later, I was the captain of my own tiny craft, puttering alongside icebergs the size of city blocks, keeping a weather eye out for bowheads and listening carefully for the groaning cacophony of a calving event. You want to be close — but not too close.

Ilulissat is a bucket-list destination by any stretch of the imagination. The offshore icefield feels remote and otherworldly while the nearby Jakobshavn Glacier is the fastest in the world, moving thirty metres per day and discharging nearly thirty-five billion tonnes of ice each year. Heraclitus comes to mind: you cannot step into the same waters twice in a place like this, which makes navigation a constant challenge. My team timidly wove through the crystalline labyrinth, bound for the inner harbour, while local fishermen kicked up huge wakes as they bombed past in their rigid-hulled boats. A hunter butchered a seal on an ice floe that now resembled a floating red velvet cupcake. Onshore, a wooden boardwalk wound through the doghouses where hundreds of Greenlandic sled dogs howled, awaiting winter snows. Fresh-caught char dried on lines outside wooden homes painted in bright solid colours. High above the lookout at the trail’s terminus, gauzy skies turned a salmon pink in the midnight sun.

That evening, back on the ship, we broke the news to our guests that mechanical problems would prevent us from crossing the Davis Strait and making landfall on Baffin Island. Instead, we would reverse our previous days’ route and return from whence we’d come, travelling up the majestic Sondrestrom fjord and ending our trip early in Kangerlussuaq, where we would overnight at the airport. The paying customers were aghast. I was still just happy to be there.

Founded as a meteorological station in 1927, Kangerlussuaq Airport has one of three strips in Greenland equipped to handle large planes. It is surrounded by alluvial rivers that carry vast loads of silt down from the low mountains that ring the horizon; like Ilulissat, its landscape is always in flux. Originally called Bluie West Eight (code name “Bodkin”) and later Sondrestrom Air Base, it was established as a United States Army Air Forces base in 1941, after Denmark fell to Germany. Responsibility for security of the world’s largest island passed to the Americans, whose presence was, at the time, most welcome. The site was imagined as a stop on the Crimson Route, a joint Canada-U.S. venture for ferrying planes and other matériel to Europe, although the project was abandoned in 1943. A decade later, when the Distant Early Warning Line was built, Sondrestrom assisted in building four Greenlandic radar stations, and in 1951 it was instrumental in the construction of Thule Air Base, now Pituffik Space Base, which remains the northernmost U.S. Department of Defense installation.

In the 1970s, Sondrestrom was used for launching rockets, including the Nike Apache, which became NASA’s primary sounding device for upper atmospheric study. After the fall of the Soviet Union and the subsequent abandonment of the DEW Line, the last American personnel headed home in 1992. The airport became the main air hub for Greenland — until the one in Nuuk, the capital, expanded its operations in 2024 — and still serves NATO and Danish defence purposes.

Our expedition limped back to Kangerlussuaq only days after we had left it, tails between our legs. A weathered signpost cheerily noted the flight times and direction to New York, Rome, Paris, Frankfurt, Tokyo, London, Los Angeles, and the North Pole, the closest of them all. I stepped out of the rugged passenger carrier and paused beside gargantuan tires that reached my shoulders. Our team put on a brave face for our disgruntled travellers and set up shop in the local community centre — a modular facility redolent of Lego both inside and out — while billets were found in hotels and nearby base camps, similar to those that had once housed American servicemen. The locals were delighted with the action and came out en masse, pulling on traditional beaded anoraks and filling our bowls with steaming suaasat. They performed drum dances, sang, and turned out a polka long into the night.

It was not lost on me — on that trip in 2014 or the many that followed — that polar travel remains one of the modern world’s last truly unpredictable experiences, from the harshness of the environment to regular equipment failures. I was grateful for and humbled by the warmth and kindness of those who have long called the region home. Given the blustering rhetoric now coming out of the White House, I can’t help but wonder if they’re feeling as hospitable today.