On the Earth's Margins

From the freezing fjords in icy winters to the ethereal view of midnight sun in summers—an expedition here is like trespassing into the Earth's great wilderness

- By ARCHANA SINGH

Tasiilaq, the biggest town of East Greenland; (below) Fresh Ice claving at Kárale Glacier

Few places on Earth remain as remote, untouched, and defiantly wild as East Greenland. Imagine icebergs as tall as 100-metre skyscrapers, glaciers still considered youthful at 50,000 years, and landscapes sculpted over 2.5 billion years. This is not a land of contrasts—it’s a realm suspended in geological time.

Getting here feels wonderfully improbable. A small fixed-wing plane from Reykjavik lands on Kulusuk’s gravel runway beside a village of just 250 people. From there, a 3-km walk leads to the harbour, where an expedition vessel take you deeper into the Arctic wilderness.

Sailing through the Sermilik Fjord offers one of the planet’s most surreal spectacles. Norway, Alaska, Chile, and New Zealand may have claimed the fjord narrative, but Sermilik rewrites it. Its Greenlandic name means “place with glaciers,” yet that undersells the scale. Fed by a chain of colossal glaciers—including Helheim, among Greenland’s most dramatic ice producers—Sermilik becomes a crowded highway of drifting ice architecture: blue cathedrals, fortress walls, sculptural towers and arches forged over decades by wind and water.