I remember the day very well. It was the first time we drove up to the glacial ice from our base station in Kangerlussuaq (Western Greenland), where we had patiently been waiting for two days for the weather to clear. I took this photo during a three-week fieldwork campaign in July of 2025 as part of the Deep Purple project. As part of the project, we were in the field to collect glacial ice-algae samples, which grow on (and thereby darken) ice surfaces.
The grey fog finally lifted, and our patience was rewarded with bright blue sky and sunshine that made the small blue meltwater rivers sparkle. I recall the crunch of the ice below my feet and how we walked up one of the small hills which followed one other all the way to the horizon. We were still very close to the margin of the glacier, and had only walked a couple hundreds of meters from the moraines where we parked our car, but when I faced inland, the ice spread out into a stunning vastness that is hard to capture in a photo. Behind each of the hills –some steep with almost-sharp ridges, some gently rounded– we found something new: shallow blue lakes with sediment covering the bottom, whooshing rivers, the glisten of clean ice and cryoconite holes of all sizes. I remember the brightness of the landscape, so bright that it hurt the eyes, the cold of the wind, and how all I could hear was the wind, the water and my own breath. When we turned around to walk back to the car, it felt like coming back from a different planet. Just as soon as I stepped off the ice, I already began to look forward to returning to this beautiful, wild, and humbling vastness.
Edited by Mack Baysinger
