patriciawatt

I SAW AN ICEBERG!!  My first ever!!

It wasn’t up close and personal but it was a huge iceberg, looking like a ship,  as a matter of fact some of us thought it was a ship, as we were sailing from Isafjordur, Iceland to Qaqortoq, Greenland.  This area is known as Iceberg alley, especially in the summer, but at this time of the year I saw just the one.  We continued on through the narrow but beautiful  Prince Christian Sound which splits the southern part of Greenland from the rest of the island.  The long fjord system is mostly surrounded by steep mountains, the highest is around 2220 metres or 7280 feet.  We passed by several glaciers that drop straight to the water and they calve the icebergs.

My first sightings of Greenland were indeed mostly white, making me think that Iceland is green and Greenland is white.  There is a story about Eric the Red who was thrown out of Iceland and banished to Greenland around AD985.  He needed more people to populate the area so he went back to Iceland and told them wonderful stories about this GREEN land, in order to entice them to return with him.  But indeed, at this time of the year, except for the glaciers, this area seem to be free from ice and snow.

Greenland has a total population of just under 57.000 and the country itself is about the size of western Europe. Approximately 80% is permanently covered by a huge icecap, which we have all recently heard is melting very quickly. The population lives scattered along the ice-free areas along the coast and around the beautiful fjords, with the majority of the population in the lower west area. A smaller portion of the population lives in the northern Thule area. Nuuk is the capital of Greenland with approximately 18,000 people and the language is Greenlandic, along with English & Danish as second languages. Greenlandic is closely related to the language of the Inuit in Canada. The first people came to Greenland from Canada in the early AD900s. The present population are descendants of that Thule culture. The Norse also came to Greenland around the same time but only stayed for 400=500 years. Greenland is an autonomous country of the Kingdon of Denmark, meaning it has the freedom to govern itself. The currency is the Danish kroner and fishing is Greenland’s main industry.