Prince Christian Sound in southern Greenland

Southern tip of a northern isle. Prince Christian Sound in southern Greenland

The sheer size of Greenland is hard to put in perspective. The world's largest island is more than 836,000 square miles—that's more than three times the size of Texas and 170,000 square miles larger than Alaska. It is a land of deep fjords and thick ice that must have made the Norse explorers feel right at home when they landed there a thousand years ago.

Today we find ourselves at the southern tip of Greenland, in Prince Christian Sound, a fjord system 60 miles long and at times as narrow as 1,500 feet across. It flows through steep canyons of granite with slopes rising 1,200 feet above the water. The placid calm of these waters is frequently disrupted by calving glaciers, breaching whales, and the cruise ships that visit the region. The only human habitation in this frozen landscape is the Inuit village of Aappilattoq, home to about 100 people.