Greenland has a rich vocabulary for ice and snow. But what happens to language when those natural phenomena start to disappear?

IT WAS MY second day in Ilulissat, Greenland’s third-largest town, and after exploring the modest center, I soon found myself on the outskirts, walking beside a broad meadow * apussineq: snowdrift carpeted in sled dogs. There were hundreds and hundreds of them, all tied on lengths of chains and waiting desultorily, it seemed, for snow. They paid me no mind, but as I passed the last of them, a sound I had never heard before—half joyful yodel, half demonic despair—rose from their midst: It was feeding time. I continued for a mile or so as the road turned to trail, but without trees to block the sound, the noise of the dogs stayed with me. When I finally reached the edge of the fjord, on Greenland’s western coast, their cries formed an appropriately otherworldly soundtrack for the fathomless imeq: water spectacle that lay before me. Towering in the bay like some kind of marvelous ghost city were massive icebergs, tinted pink and lavender by the setting sun and floating ethereally on the glassy sea. I tried to formulate words for what I was seeing, but they wouldn’t come.

* apussineq: snowdrift

kassoq: black ice

masannartuliorpoq: snow that’s falling and wet

* Greenlandic 101: Essential terms for weather and precipitation

The beauty of it was awesome, and I don’t mean that in the California dude sense. I mean it in the original sense of the word: wonder tinged with a degree of dread or fear. It was impossible to look across the ice fjord and Disko Bay and not feel reverence for the ravishing beauty of it. But this being Greenland, a land that for at least the past 100,000 years has been largely covered and surrounded by ice, it was also impossible not to feel a certain foreboding. As those spectacular floating sculptures set ominously to the cries of hungry dogs reminded me, the ice is disappearing. However much we may think we know what that