Twenty billion tonnes of ice a year, and probably the Titanic’s iceberg
Sermeq Kujalleq is the most productive glacier in the northern hemisphere. It moves 20 to 35 metres a day, and it empties down forty kilometres of fjord into Disko Bay, calving about 20 billion tonnes of ice a year. Some of the bergs stand a kilometre tall. The big ones drift south and often do not finish melting until they are down around 40 to 45 degrees north, which is the latitude of New York, and this is the glacier generally credited with producing the iceberg that sank the Titanic. UNESCO listed it in 2004 both for what it looks like and because this glacier is central to how we came to understand human-driven climate change. People have lived here nearly 4,000 years; the Sermermiut site shows three separate Inuit cultures. Boardwalk from Ilulissat town.
Ilulissat, Greenland
See it on the map
Other places on the map within a couple of hours of here.
