Fifty words for snow: A micro-expedition to Scoresby Sound

'Nutaryuk' ('fresh snow') and 'Muruaneq' ('soft deep snow'). The Arctic Inuit have over fifty words for snow and ice in their Inuktitut language, reflecting its importance in everyday life. This was, however, fewer than the amount of superlatives I could muster as we first sailed into an alley of icebergs off the Eastern Greenland coast. 

As the setting sun began its nightly three-hour smoulder in the world's most extensive fjord system at Scoresby Sound, all nine of my fellow passengers were out on the raised metal bow of the MV Vikingfjord - an indomitable, now retrofitted small vessel from 1974. "Let's go play with some icebergs," John Rodsted, our Australian expedition leader, had said before our experienced Russian sea captain, Sergey, pirouetted us around the bergs. With sheer faces streaked by inky-blue freshwater veins, some of the icebergs rose forty to fifty metres high. Sometimes, they have acquired a chalky blue appearance, but they are mostly brilliant white, glistening like moulds of fine porcelain. The more translucent glassy ice was hundreds of thousands of years old. All were drifting south, like ghostly apparitions of the Mary Celeste, breaking away from Greenland's ever-receding glaciers - iced tongues that protrude from the island's colossal ice sheet.