Travel deep dive
Ilulissat Icefjord: Where Greenland's Icebergs Begin
Ilulissat stands on the northern shore of a fjord that is completely filled with ice, and the reason sits at the fjord's head: Sermeq Kujalleq drains straight off the Greenland Ice Sheet and is one of the fastest-moving glaciers on the planet. What arrives in front of the town is the debris of that speed, a jam of icebergs grinding slowly westward into Disko Bay, some of them the size of a city block. It is the one place in Greenland where a landscape on that scale begins a short walk from the edge of a town.
Updated 2026-09-19
Sermeq Kujalleq: one of the world's fastest glaciers
Sermeq Kujalleq advances on the order of forty metres a day, drains a large share of the Greenland Ice Sheet, and ends in seawater rather than on land. Those three facts together produce everything a visitor sees: roughly a tenth of all the icebergs calved anywhere in Greenland come off this single glacier front. The fjord that carries them runs about 55 kilometres from the glacier to the open bay and reaches some six kilometres across, and what fills it is not a smooth sheet but a jam, bergs wedged against bergs, refreezing and breaking apart again on their way out.
UNESCO inscribed the Ilulissat Icefjord in 2004, and the listing is a natural one rather than a cultural one, which is worth knowing before you go. The fjord is valued as a place where the behaviour of an ice sheet can be watched directly, at a front that happens to be both exceptionally active and exceptionally easy to reach. The scenery is the by-product. What makes the site unusual is that the process producing it runs continuously, loudly, and within earshot of a working town.
On foot: the Sermermiut boardwalk and the Blue Route
The standard first encounter is a walk, not a boat. A raised boardwalk leads from the southern edge of Ilulissat out to Sermermiut, an abandoned settlement site on a grassy shelf above the water, and ends at a viewpoint where ice fills the entire width of the fjord below. The boardwalk is short and level, which makes this one of very few landscapes of its kind that does not ask for fitness or equipment before it will show itself.
From there the marked Blue Route continues along the coast into a longer half-day walk that opens a sequence of different angles onto the ice, and the town's wider trail network carries on beyond it. Sticking to the marked routes matters more here than the gentle start suggests: the ground at the fjord edge is rock and heath with abrupt drops, and the shoreline is not somewhere to linger, because the way calving ice behaves is the one Greenlandic hazard that reliably catches visitors who assume a beach is a beach.
Boats, flightseeing and the rest of Disko Bay
Boats leave Ilulissat harbour for the bay and the mouth of the fjord, going close enough to read the scale of a single berg and no closer, since crews keep a working distance from ice that can roll without warning. Flightseeing by helicopter or small fixed-wing aircraft is the other standard option and the only way to hold the glacier front and the ice sheet behind it in one view. Around midsummer, when the sun does not set at this latitude, evening sailings run in long low gold light instead of darkness.
Disko Bay is also whale water. Humpback, minke and fin whales come north to feed here through the summer, often surfacing with icebergs behind them, while beluga, bowhead and narwhal are the species that use Greenlandic waters in the cold months instead. Across the bay lies Disko Island, reached by boat from Ilulissat or Aasiaat, where the town of Qeqertarsuaq opens onto a landscape that looks nothing like the mainland: a moderate half-day hike leads to Kuannit and its contorted basalt columns, growing thick with angelica.