Trekking on the Icecap in Greenland

The icecap covers about the 85% of the World's largest island, Greenland. The thickness of the ice is up to 1.5 miles in the central area and the weight of this huge mass has pushed the "continent" a lot of feet under the sea's level. If the Greenland's icecap would melt, the sea's level may rise up to 7 meters, or, if all the ice would be distributed in equal parts to all the inhabitants of the Earth, each of us would have an ice cube 0.625 miles by 0.625 miles by 0.625 to play with.Our target is to walk in order to reach the icecap. The trekking will take 2 days, with one night sleep in tents. Total miles to walk: 15. Level change: 2050ftAt 10:00 o'clock we start to walk toward the Icecap. We don't need to bring any water with us as on our way to the icecap we will find a lot of lakes and streams from where it is possible to drink directly. Click HERE to see the same area from a satellite. Google Earth is required.

At 16:00 we reach the icecap's moraine. The landscape is modeled by immense forces, it is like a big building site where enormous bulldozers create huge piles of heavy stones and then move them here and there.

The ground is made by sands of many different sizes and everything is kept all together by clear (transparent) ice, which is present up to the surface and acts like a glue. Amazing !We finally climb on the icecap and start to walk around.

We finally reach a deep crack with a waterfall falling inside.

I would like to go down by a rope and take a look inside... but unfortunately we aren't carring the proper equipment.

Often, extensive areas of the icecap are covered by many small holes, as shown on the above pictures. The holes are built by dark particles flying or raining on the icecap: as they are dark, they will heat-up under the sun, melting the ice all around. An hole several inches deep may take several years to build. Many holes are the home of a small form of animal life, that uses the minerals contained in the dark particles itself as food.

We start to walk back to a small campsite to eat and sleep.

Near the campsite there is a nice glacier where we will go the following morning.

The following day we take an extensive tour on another glacier. First of all, we cross its moraine.

Here the ice is very dirty, because it is captuing and carrying tons of debris along the way.