Itilleq, Sunday, 25th June 2023
Minuscule air bubbles ascend in perfectly straight columns as if we were submerged in Champagne, with the sun reflecting from the top of each little sphere. When listening intently, we can hear the air stream, bubble after bubble released from its icy enclosure. We’re enveloped in azures, blues, cyans, turquoises and whites, ranging from intense colours to delicate pale tones.
We’re freediving in Greenland next to a bergy bit that has calved from the neighbouring iceberg not long ago. Grounded in the shallows of the sandy bay in a stunning side-fjord, it already gives shelter to fish hiding underneath.
Light beams play and meander in the water, drawing patterns in the water column, the ice, the ground. They filter and focus through the waves as if someone were looking with searchlights. Plankton drifts by and catches the light.
One of them catches my eye: a translucent ellipsoid with eight rows of combs along its body. It reminds me of an elongated stripy melon. The combs consist of tiny plates that act like prisms, diffracting light in iridescent waves of rainbow colours. These little comb jellies are called ctenophore, owing their name to the Greek words ctenos (‘comb’) and phoros (‘carrier’). The cells making up the plates share elements present in human cells. The pulsating movements and accompanying rainbow prism ripples rivet my attention.
Looking up, little highlights and sparks appear between the rays of light, where water droplets hit the surface above us and bounce back, sending ripples over the waves that soon lose themselves in the wavelets created by the wind. The ice is melting in the sun, eroding into organic shapes.
Melt and sea water swirl in tight pirouettes around the ice, embracing each another wildly, though staying separate. Two dancers in an intricate Tango Argentino. Our vision becomes blurred whenever we stir, as if looking into syrup water medley. There is a strong thermocline too; the water temperature changing dramatically with the depth, which acts similarly. At the surface, the water is about 8 °C, but further down it can be as little as 2 °C. When we keep still, current slowly displaces the twirls and we can see clearly again.
The intertidal belt is home to an abundant forest, consisting of what appears to be uncountable varieties underwater plants of many shapes, and hues of brown, amber, yellow, and startling green. Semi-transparent globules, fairy hair, grasses, bushes, thickets with fabulous names, bladder wrack, knotted wrack, rock weed, different sorts of brown algae. Layers of growth that remind me of descriptions of rainforest canopies, where rich ecosystems exist in each tree’s crown. Algae grows on seaweed, mussels hold on to branches, sea urchins clasp stalks, snails cling to leaves, worms climb stems, starfish hide in crevices, fish camouflage under foliage, big mussels rally in clusters on the ground. Diving through this dense forest feels like flying.
I return to the deeper area, where the bergy bit lies grounded. The ice crystals scatter the light in a dazzling splendour of reflections that keep me enthralled as I fin along the side of the berg. The ice is far from uniform, even this smallish chunk has a profusion of textures, opacities, crystals, shapes, colours. At one end, there is gin-clear section, translucent and barely visible in the water. Meltwater that had filled a crack and frozen anew into water ice. Its surface is curved and indented by little dimples and hollows like a golf ball, licked and melted by the sea water. Bubbles released from the white ice underneath rise through a gash in its middle. Only some edges catch the light — a frozen twin of the comb jelly.
Diving along and across the ice, playing with the surfaces, watching the changing light, the interplay of water, air, light, melt and salt water, is addictive. We take turns diving down and watch out for one another. I’m mesmerised and keep circling the berg. Closing with the ice, we are conscious of the temperature difference and the water becomes decidedly less salty. Slowly, our toes begin to feel the cold and our fingertips do too.
We return to the paddle board for a break and to warm up. Tied to a hunk jutting out of the berg, it acts as our diving buoy and gear storage. We brought along insulated bottles filled to the brim with hot water that we pour into the socks and gloves. Pure bliss! The pain in the toes quickly gives way to feeling toasty once more as the body sends warm blood to our extremities.
We decide to go for a paddle and a change of scenery. Both of us on our knees on the board, we take turns rowing towards the big iceberg. We learned to balance with both of us on the board when we were in the Caribbean, and increasingly used it as a fast replacement for the dinghy — rowed with two oars, it can be very fast. Today, we only have one with us. We keep our distance to the berg since any moment bits could break off and it could become unstable, rotate, break apart. Ice might not only fall in our heads, but also shoot up from below.
’[…] what would seem to be static and immobile, can change all of a sudden. […] the change that you think is never going to come has been here and gone while you’ve been making that argument,’ Barry Lopez, a master writer, not only on nature and the Arctic, highlights in the book ‘Syntax of the River: The Pattern Which Connects’. Never has it been as clear to me as when being close to the ice and the rocks. Rock and ice seem utterly immobile to us and as if they always have been and always will be. But it’s just our attention span and our life times, our rate of change, that make it appear so. If we stop and watch, we can see the ice melting, rocks falling, and if we expand our time horizon a little more, we see them changing their shapes dramatically.
As we pass, we watch a small ice piece in perpetual motion. It keeps rotating, never in balance. Waterfalls rush down over the edge of the overhanging cliff that the water surface carved into the sides of the berg. All around, melting drops splash on the water surface underneath, sending ripples in all directions. Two startling azure stripes cut diagonally through the ice — another crack filled with frozen meltwater. Is this where ‘our’ bergy bit has calved from?
A long tongue sticks out underneath the water surface, clearly visible as change in the water colour which suddenly shifts from dark petrol to a startling intense swimming-pool-turquoise. We paddle around it, keeping our offing. Nevertheless, we are on edge, we know that if a big piece calves now, it will be very interesting to say the least. We make our way around it, admiring its stark beauty and being intensely aware of how small we are compared to nature, and how things might change all of a sudden.
