A 2,500-nautical-mile trip from Svalbard down the coast of East Greenland taught Vanessa MacDonald what it really means to be cool.

It’s become quite trendy to ask for a botanical gin or a flavoured tonic water, but if you really want to impress, there is nothing cooler than adding a 50,000-year-old ice cube to it.

Thanks to travel magazines and documentaries, most of us think that we know what an iceberg looks like, but it’s only when you fish a huge block of crystal-clear ice out of the water that you begin to appreciate the lifecycle of these behemoths. 

To really understand why so many people are warning about global warming, you need to see ice for yourself. In Greenland, the ice cap extends to the very edge of the enormous island, from the polar pack ice to just a little bit south of Iceland. 

It is so cold on the ice cap that it never rains. It only snows, adding layers of frozen water which compresses to form ice. The ice is so thick that they can only surmise what mountains and valleys lie below. It blankets everything like a thick, white, featureless tablecloth: 3km deep and so heavy that it pushes the landmass of Greenland 300m down into the Earth’s crust.

But that ice moves, albeit slowly. At the edges of Greenland, with the ice cap always glowing on the horizon, it starts its reluctant descent towards the sea, icy fingers clawing their way through the rock, dragging with it everything in its path. Once it gets to the sea, its relentless march comes to a dramatic end. 

Huddled a few hundred metres away, at a safe distance, we sit in a dozen Zodiac dinghies, each carrying 10 red-jacketed passengers. Their motors are no longer running and the clicks of 120 cameras do not even make a dent in the enormous silence. And then there is a rumble-like thunder in spite of the cloudless sky.

A puff of snowdust rises from the face of the glacier and, without so much as a sigh of farewell, a chunk the size of Portomaso Tower calves off the glacier, rolling over into the sea below, sending a metre-high wave across the bay. Even before it has bobbed back to the surface, there is another rumble and another piece of the glacier breaks off, leaving behind it a savage blue scar of fresh ice. 

Photo: Vanessa MacDonald

The wave shoves the smaller icebergs in the bay against each other, like billiard balls rattling across a table, many of them shedding smaller pieces until the smallest of all are washed up on to the red sands.

Watching the calving is one of those life moments that plays in slow motion in your mind: the majesty of nature at its most humbling.

That night, back on the MS Expedition, the passengers compare notes, re-play their videos, swap photos, and sip their gin and tonics made with a chunk of the diamond-ice fished out of the sea. Once broken up, the oxygen trapped in it escapes, popping and crackling as its millennia of history reach the end. It is a cocktail like no other.

Going to one of the last true wildernesses in the world comes with great responsibility. Passengers are briefed about the voluntary code adopted by the ship: our insulated boots are carefully washed and scrubbed after each shore excursion to prevent contamination from one bay to another. We are warned not to pick pebbles or driftwood, and, when on our two-and-a-half hour morning treks, not only are we warned not to step on the moss but we are also discouraged from walking in Indian file, as that eventually causes a path which would detract from the sense – for us and for those who come after us – of being the first people to ever set foot there.

Photo: Vanessa MacDonald

The two-week, 2,500-mile trip on the MS Expedition takes us from 79°N – on the very edge of the pack ice leading to the North Pole – around Svalbard’s fjords, where the chances of spotting a polar bear have been boosted tremendously by the blanket ban on hunting. The ship then crosses to Greenland (a two-day journey!) and slowly works its way in and out of the splendid fjords, often moving once we are asleep.

Another two-day crossing brings the ship to the end of its journey in Reykjavik. But during those two weeks, there is hardly even enough time to enjoy the on-board sauna and gym. The head of the expedition team wakes us up on the public address system at 7am with a gentle ‘Good morning!’, followed by the weather forecast, a general briefing on where we are, and a reminder that breakfast is to be served at 8am.

Food on cruise boats is legendary, and this one is no different in spite of its size, with extraordinary meals served by staff who are always on hand to help: their T-shirts are labelled CEO – chief experience officer. By 9am, armed scouts set off to shore to make sure that there are no polar bears around. Only once they have given the all-clear are the passengers ferried to land, where they are split into walking groups, going up hills, to see lakes and abandoned huts, to old quarries and whaling stations, across geological formations, on the track of musk ox. On the way, the resident experts explain flora, fauna, geology and history in our open-air classroom.

Scroll right to see more photos. Photos: Vanessa MacDonald

And then, one day, the walkie-talkie crackles to life and, with typical understated British calmness, the expedition leader informs the guides that polar bears have been spotted and that we should all be evacuated. Within 17 minutes, all the walking groups are safely taken off the beach. We later find out that it would have only taken 12 minutes for the bears to reach us had they been so inclined. 

The afternoons are dedicated to Zodiac tours around the icebergs, and the evenings to lectures and documentaries explaining how extraordinary nature is to come up with the elements that make it possible to survive in this most inhospitable of environments: the hollow fur of bears, the blubber of walruses and musk oxen whose insulation is so effective that an infrared-red camera only picks up the heat from their extremities.

Spare hours are filled with art lessons, live music in the bar, films, games nights, fancy dress competitions (it is a cruise ship after all), and enough food – including champagne and lobster for the Captain’s dinner – to make your plate wobble with anticipation.

We even see the Aurora Borealis on two nights, woken gently up in the wee hours of the morning by the expedition leader’s dulcet tones (oh, to have recorded him on my phone!).

This article first appeared in Sunday Circle Magazine.

And yet, in spite of the myriad of memories, it is the ice that I will remember most. The icebergs that formed a natural arch, the one that looked like a castle out of Game of Thrones, the crystal clear ones, the chunks washed ashore. And underlying their beauty is the knowledge that we are destroying them in our own lifetime, that our grandchildren may never get to see nature at its most majestic.

Greenland is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet, and the consequences – of rising seawater and changing currents – will affect every corner of the globe. What took nature hundreds of thousands of years to create is melting slowly but surely before our very eyes.

Put it on your bucket list. Sooner rather than later. 

This article first appeared in the November issue of Sunday Circle. For more fascinating stories, download the digital version of Sunday Circle magazine through the TOM Mag app, which is available via the App Store and Google Play.