Disko Island: the grooviest place name you’ve never heard of and the second largest island of Greenland (including Greenland itself). I first read about this far-out place in an account of the Polaris expedition, during which nineteen members of its crew found themselves separated from their ship and adrift on sea ice. (They floated over 1800 miles over the course of six months while surviving an Arctic winter, with their icy raft slowly cracking and withering away).

Unlike most of mainland Greenland, Disko is volcanic in nature, like nearby Iceland. Also like Iceland, it is relatively green (unlike Greenland) due to its volcanic soils. This isn’t a coincidence: Disko was part of the same volcanic hotspot that is currently forming Iceland.

Disko Island (Qeqertarsuaq) and surroundings.

A brief attempt to trace the origin of the name “Disko” didn’t yield any results, but the origin of its Greenlandic name Qeqertarsuaq is clear, with ‘qeqertaq’ meaning island and ‘suaq’ meaning big… “Big Island”. Beyond Qeqertarsuaq, I’ve struggled to track down other place names for locations across Greenland. For all the mountains, fjords, glaciers and islets, most aren’t labeled on Google Maps and are more easily found buried in older paper charts or scientific papers. It was with this search for names where I realized I was having enough fun learning a bit of Greenlandic and mapping these places that this could become my next project.

Jumping back one year to February 2021 on a particularly humid day in Puerto Rico, I was sitting on the beach reading a book about snow and ice (and enjoying the irony), knowing my next line of work might concern the Arctic. My time in the Caribbean was coming to an end and I was looking for inspiration for my next adventure (job). Just two months later, I was sitting on an LC-130 en route to Greenland for a stint on the top of the ice sheet; in almost every way, this opportunity arose because of my time in the tropics. There must have been some innate response to get away from the man-eating bugs, heat and hurricanes, but perhaps I swung too far the other way and traded heat and sand for subzero outhouses and heavyweight parkas. Still, Greenland is an island with beautiful turquoise waters and eternal summer sun, so in that sense it isn’t too far off from Puerto Rico. But I digress…

Far from anything, conducting an elevation and snow accumulation survey of the ice sheet (Summer 2021).

On the ice sheet, one of my favorite jobs was riding out on snowmobiles into barren white sea of ice, far from the sight of our research station, to take a survey of snow accumulation and ice sheet elevation (the ice measures about two miles thick here). This ground data is then used to calibrate the Ice, Cloud, land Elevation Satellite (ICESat), which itself uses space lasers to measure surface height across the entire ice sheet—an incredibly valuable mission for tracking changes in Greenland’s ice mass. Data from ICESat was also used in part to create a Greenland-wide elevation model, which scientists can use to see how the ice sheet has changed relative to this benchmark. It’s this elevation model that forms the basis of the second part of this project. Using a technique I’ve previously written about HERE, I transformed these data into the following maps while combining them with the Greenlandic place names I managed to track down.

The “raw” data: black pixels correspond to sea level, white pixels correspond to high elevation. The trick is figuring out how to make this more visually appealing. All data from the MEaSUREs project [Howat, I., A. Negrete, and B. Smith. 2014. The Greenland Ice Mapping Project (GIMP) land classification and surface elevation data sets].

If there’s anything I learned from my time on the ice and from this weekend project, it’s that mapping our planet is still very much a thriving field. Take a simple question like “where is the northernmost landmass on Earth”, and it turns out the answer is not so simple. We know it’s some islet off the coast of northern Greenland, but this region is incredibly inaccessible and dynamic, with small islands likely sprouting up and sinking away with no one ever knowing about them. Throughout the last several years, all kinds of exciting finds have popped up in Northern Greenland, from a buried meteor impact crater to a canyon half a mile deep and longer than the Grand Canyon.

But mapping isn’t just about setting out on a ship and documenting unknown features (or more likely today, launching a satellite). It’s also about tracking spatial changes through the past and future. Scoresbysund is the largest fjord in the world, with its main branch stretching over 110 kilometers (68 miles). At this immense size, it’s formation must have started long before other smaller fjords across the island and before the last series of Ice Ages. Studying this region gives insights to how other areas of Greenland may look or respond in the future. In the past, this fjord may have been one of the first to experience the effects of ice. Now, no longer burdened by the weight, this region is actually springing upwards and gaining measurable elevation (albeit, at a very, very slow rate), a phenomena that will affect more of Greenland as it sheds more mass.

Greenland truly is the kingdom of ice; over 80% of the island is covered by it, and the impact of this medium on the island is apparent: carving out the world’s largest fjords, some of the deepest canyons and valleys, and some of the steepest mountains. Look out across the ice sheet and it’s hard not to feel small… but for such a massive, seemingly stable medium, no other solid object on Earth works harder to sculpt a landscape so profoundly, while changing so much and so fast itself. So here are some maps of Greenland, to show the power of ice upon a landscape.