Ilulissat Iceberg Diving

Ilulissat · Disko Bay · Greenland

Ilulissat sits on the shore of Disko Bay in western Greenland, facing the mouth of the Ilulissat Icefjord, a UNESCO World Heritage Site where the Jakobshavn Isbrae glacier calves icebergs at a rate of roughly 20 billion tonnes per year. The icebergs that drift into the bay are the size of city blocks, their visible mass above water representing only a fraction of the ice extending below. Diving alongside these frozen giants is one of the most extreme and visually surreal experiences available to scuba divers anywhere on the planet. I suited up on the deck of a small expedition vessel on a July morning, the low Arctic sun casting long shadows across a bay littered with white ice of every size. The air temperature was five degrees but the drysuit and multiple undergarment layers insulated me well enough. My guide, a Greenlandic diver who has been running iceberg dives for over a decade, had selected a large tabular berg that had been grounded on the shallow bay floor for several days, making it relatively stable. We entered the water from the Zodiac fifty metres from the berg's face. The cold hit immediately, a full-body compression that the drysuit could not entirely prevent. Water temperature was one degree Celsius. My regulator breathed stiffly, the cold air harsh in my throat. But the moment I put my face underwater, all discomfort faded. The iceberg extended below the surface as a wall of luminous blue-white ice, its contours sculpted by currents and melt into curves and hollows that caught the Arctic light and refracted it in shades of cerulean, cobalt, and electric turquoise. The ice was not solid flat but textured: ridges, grooves, and melt channels ran across its face, and in places the ice was translucent enough to see light filtering through from the opposite side.