Nuuk’s Stunning Landscape Unlike Anywhere Else on Earth

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Icey oceans and snowcapped mountains surround Nuuk, one of the world’s most remote cities. The unique landscape is unlike anywhere else, and emphasizes the resilience of the people who live there.

Surrounding the small city of about 20,000, Nuuk is nestled amongst several mountains and large hills. Snow covers every building, road, and all other surfaces that are exposed to the elements. Not much vegetation can survive in this harsh landscape, but there is some small vegetation that thrives when the weather warms up.

  • View from Nuuk airport. Photo: Layla Czaplewski
  • Colorful home in Nuuk. Photo: Layla Czaplewski
  • Bay dotted with boats. Photo: Layla Czaplewski
  • View from the marina in Nuuk. Photo: Layla Czaplewski
  • Small beach on the coastline. Photo: Layla Czaplewski

“I personally [recommend] going to Greenland and being able to see the landscape, and see the ecosystems that are there. There’s muskox, there’s arctic fox, there’s incredible wildflowers. It’s a very vibrant and beautiful place, especially in the summertime,” said Dr. Spruce Schoenemann, an Arctic researcher based out of the University of Montana.

The mountains have several hiking trails, although most of the year, they are covered in snow and ice, making them difficult to travel without proper equipment. Snowmobile and horseback are some of the ways people traverse these trails when the snow is too deep. The mountain trails are also home to the small shrubbery that can survive the harsh winters.

The town looks out into the ocean, littered with boats and small chunks of ice floating by. There are several small beaches around the ocean, although the temperature makes them unusable for swimming for most of the year.

City Skyline Covered in Snow

The main marina in Nuuk is tucked into a large fjord, with stunning views of both the ocean and the mountain landscape. Fishing is the main industry in Greenland, so the water is constantly filled with boats of various sizes. Military boats, fishing trawlers, and small personal boats are some of the most common types to find.

The city itself doesn’t have a very large skyline, just a few larger buildings downtown that house things like a mall and government offices. Most of the buildings are homes in the Danish style. Very plain features on the outside, the main variation between homes is their bright colors. A variety of yellows, blues, greens, and even pink are just a handful of the colors of the homes in Nuuk. Many buildings also have colorful murals on the side, adding to the rainbow of colors that dot the landscape.

Changing Landscape

Nuuk’s unique landscape, as well as the rest of Greenland, has been threatened by climate change in recent years. According to Dr. William Colgan, a scientist who studies ice sheets, Greenland is losing more than 8,000 metric tons of ice per second. This ice melt is leaving large swaths of land previously covered by ice for thousands of years uncovered.

“Even if you show up once, you can see all around the ice sheet, this recently exposed ground that looks very different. No vegetation, just this dusty, unconsolidated, sandy soil. And you can see that it was covered with ice not too long ago, and now it’s not. If you go once, I think you’re hit over the head with how much the ice,” said Colgan.

This story is part of a semester-long investigative reporting project into Greenland’s people, history, and culture. It was created by an advanced reporting class in the Journalism, Advertising, and Media Studies program at UW-Milwaukee. Other stories from the project are available on Edge of the Arctic: Greenland, the Land of the People.

This work was made possible through the support of MPC Endowment Ltd., the philanthropic affiliate of the Milwaukee Press Club, and a private donor.