Ilulissat Isfjord, Greenland

ILULISSAT ISFJORD

UNESCO World Heritage Site is located just north of the 69th Parallel on the western coast of Greenland between the settlements of Ilulissat and Ilimanaq. It lies about 350 miles (or a 1.5-hour plane ride) north of Nuuk, the country’s capital and largest municipality.

The park’s boundaries begin at the mouth of Disko Bugt and hug tight to the fjord’s watershed as they crawl eastward for 25 miles along its sharp ridges and tundra. As the seabed abruptly rises to meet the Sermeq Kujalleq glacier—the fastest and most productive in the world outside Antarctica—the area fans out and rises gradually with the accumulating ice as it pierces roughly 20 miles into the Greenlandic Inland Ice sheet.

Other than during the summer, the fjord is perpetually covered by the seasonal advance of Sermeq Kujalleq, perennially both creating and destroying a vibrant cold-water ecosystem protected under the ice. The fjord itself hosts many of the Arctic’s most emblematic fl ora and fauna, including ringed seals, halibut, fi nn and minke whales, Arctic poppy, cottongrass, several species of falcons and gulls, and the elusive Greenland shark. Polar bears have also been known to make appearances, although encounters that far south are usually quite rare.

Human activity in the area dates back generations. The Saqqaq people were the fi rst recorded group to settle the area around 2,500 BCE, only to disappear a millennium later. Ruins of their settlement at Sermermiut (“site of the glacier people” in Greenlandic) can still be seen today nestled in a shallow valley opening near the mouth of the fjord. The ruins contain some of the most well-preserved turf houses of ancient hunter-gathers in the world. After the Norse left Greenland in the mid-15th Century, Sermermiut served as a center of trade for locals and European colonists for 450 years. At this point, the spread of Danish colonization and founding of Ilulissat just north of Isfjord had pushed the last remaining residents of the valley into town and eff ectively exiled the traditional hunter-gather in western Greenland.

Hunting remains a primary source of food around Greenland. The Isfjord’s incredibly productive waters have made relationships between residents and park management tenuous ones, with the former arguing that increased conservation eff orts have limited access to important fi sheries since UNESCO fi rst designated the site in 2004. Recent increases in tourism and population around Ilulissat add to the many anthropogenic pressures threatening the conservation of the area today. Avannaata Kommunia—the park’s local management entity—has worked in close partnership with Naalakkersuisut (Greenland’s National Agency for Nature and Environment) and UNESCO to limit encroaching development. A series of amendments were passed by the Home Rule Government of Greenland in 2007 and 2014 to establish a buff er zone for human activity around the park and limit fi shing and whaling activity in the waters along the coast and in Disko Bugt, respectively.

Sermeq Kujalleq contains the highest-quality ice samples from the Quaternary period in the world and has been the subject of much attention by climatologists and glaciologists for over 250 years. However, global climate change has been pushing the summer extent of the glacier further onto land instead of its typical location fl oating in the fjord waters.

The continuing conservation of the Ilulissat Isfjord World Heritage Area is imperative to protecting such an outstanding example of Earth’s natural history and the ways in which it can be altered.