Air Date: Week of March 7, 2025

A member of the crew is dwarfed by the sheer size and scale of the landscape around him. (Photo: © Mark Seth Lender)

With its staggering volume of ice, the Greenland ice sheet is surely a sight to behold, and Living on Earth’s Explorer in Residence Mark Seth Lender brought back this memory from a visit to that otherworldly place.

Transcript

CURWOOD: With its staggering volume of ice, the Greenland ice sheet is surely a sight to behold, and Living on Earth’s Explorer in Residence Mark Seth Lender brought back this memory from a visit to that otherworldly place.

On the Greenland Ice
Greenland Icecap
© 2025 Mark Seth Lender
All Rights Reserved

From the Davis Straight among icebergs the size of small towns, through the sea smoke, there under low clouds banked like rolled bed sheets: Mountains! 1600 meters high! Sharp and tight and steep. Like all distant heights deceptive in their scope and scale. Few have names. Fewer still have been climbed. Somewhere between them, before the sun is gone, we will reach the mouth of Kangerlussuaq Fjord. Beyond lies the Greenland ice.

In the afternoon of the following day, the sun is too bright even for a sideways glance. And the four wheel with its high chassis and oversized tires paws its way along the closest thing to a road up here. Smacking and bouncing, the big diesel growling in its lowest gear.

One more rise. Then another. And nothing much to see. And then –

Ah…

I expected everything to be WHITE! White on Rice, white. Where the ice sheet ends here at the towering edge, a tint of blue, that peculiar blue. In each frozen locality I’ve ever been, always slightly different. Always to be expected. Always astonishing even when only a trace.

Not the icecap...

The cap is the color of old plaster poorly mixed.

Rough. Dirty.

Solid in aspect, and not to be trusted.

The ice sheet travels like a traffic jam. What’s in front has to move, so the part behind can move. It cracks, separates. Crevasses form. Melt whirls and swirls and carves its way down into the depths. It follows along the bedrock like oil from an oiler’s can, lubricates and hastens the ice on its way. The fractures - you could walk in, fall in, disappear...

Beauty describes the cold places of this Earth. Arctic; Antarctic; glaciers in the embrace of valleys they themselves have ground into the granite; fjords so deep the water is black. It exfoliates the Soul.

Nothing, nothing compares to where I stand on this, ice, the size of a continent.

CURWOOD: That’s Living on Earth’s Explorer in Residence, Mark Seth Lender.

 

Links

Visit Mark Seth Lender’s website

Special thanks to Natural Exposures

Read the field note for this essay