Greenland: Nansen Bugt

Nansen Bugt is a broad bay where the vast Greenlandic icecap gently descends right into water. Unlike most of the rest of the east Greenland coastline, smooth ice flows meet the shore without steep and rugged peaks common to all the fjords up and down the coast, – the ice cap descending directly to sea level. This unique topography made it a strategic launch point for early polar explorations, in particular that of Fridtjof Nansen, who led the first successful east-to-west crossing of Greenland’s interior ice sheet – a groundbreaking 600 km (373 mi) journey on skis that took 42 days in 1988. It took them months to find access to the ice cap as they floated south along the coast, and even here they had to navigate a lot of ice in the bay before finally touch the land and climbing onto the ice cap proper. There is a small cairn monument attesting to that.