Ice Series

In 2024 I made a trip by yacht with a small group across the Atlantic from Iceland to the coast of Greenland.  The weather was too bad to make port and we sheltered in the lee of the mountainous north-east coast, far from settlement on land or ocean shipping lanes.  For a day the water was eerily still and we were able to approach bergs.    Some looked small from a distance, but were colossal.  With sea state so quiet we heard the cracking and popping of the melting ice, and in the sharp sunlight, experienced the depth of colour in the ice, veins of deep blue translucent old ice and the sparkling white of later packed snows and reaching across the stanchions I touched the surface of the ice.

The final day of the trip in Rekjavik was unseasonably hot. Locals  both enjoyed but complained about the state of the weather.  The sky was blisteringly blue and reflected sharply in the mossy tundra and volcanic pools.

Since the trip I look back at the photographs or simply remember what it was like to be in a landscape so devoid of human and plant life, the calm and enormity of the place, the dripping changing cracking and breaking-up of the ice before my eyes and feeling the wan warmth of the sun on my hands on a day that should not have been so warm.