The new Icefjord Centre in Ilulissat is a beautiful thing. Designed by Danish architect Dorte Mandrup to “soar like a snowy owl over the landscape”, the £17.3mn visitor centre finally opened last year, the culmination of an idea that had been around for two decades. Funded by philanthropists and the Greenlandic government, it’s designed to provide a meeting place for the local community, to act as a gateway between the town and the wilderness beyond, and to encourage tourism.
Having been there in the daytime to see the exhibition explaining the science of the ice-cap and Greenland’s position at the forefront of climate change, I returned at midnight, taking advantage of the midsummer light. My footsteps echoed along the wooden boardwalk leading across the tundra, accompanied by the howling of sledge-dogs, chained up on waste ground between the town and the new centre. The footpath goes up and on to the centre’s flowing wooden roof, but for an even better vantage point I continued a few more minutes, to where the walkway climbed a smooth granite escarpment.
There, stretching away to the horizon was the area’s big attraction: the iceberg-filled fjord and behind it the Sermeq Kujalleq glacier, breathtaking in scale, a fissured, craggy expanse of whiteness stretching as far as the eye could see. It can flow at more than 20 metres per day, sending 35bn tonnes of ice annually into Disko Bay.