A fragment of another Earth

It wasn’t your ordinary helictoper journey. As the enormous red and white Sikorsky 61 hovered in to land on the rocky, uneven ground, the force of the blasting air left me barely able to breath, crouched against my rucksack, leaning into the cold wind. Through my fingers, held protectively over my eyes, I could see faces peering from the row of small windows. I was the last passenger to board, the others having embarked at the airport in Nuuk. But I was already at an exploration camp in the field, waiting to join this ride far inland to the Isua area, to visit the largest extent of oldest rocks in the world.

On board, I took my seat, the rotors wound up again to their tearing roar. We ascended into a grey sky, clouds rolling low across the mountains, across the milky fjord. The helicopter hugged the coastline, weaving between brighter patches of sky. But as we flew further inland, and the clouds closed in, we  flew a winding path between the hills closer and closer to the ground. Eventually, there was no path forward, and the pilot landed. We would wait for a break in the weather. We disembarked into the patch of scrubby ground surrounded by low hills. A light rain drifted over us as we wandered toward the nearby ruins of a stone building, the remains of a Norse settlement from another time, silent now, almost consumed by the thick shrubs that grew eagerly around its walls and inside the small room – now open to the heavy sky – where people once lived.

After a time, the sky grew a little brighter and we crowded back into the helicopter. This time, the pilot found his way through the broken clouds and soon we sat, each pressed against the cold windows, looking down at the moon-like landscape of ancient rocks spread below us. The enormous red and white helicopter touched down on the rocky ground, and the shuddering roar of the rotors wound down to a slow, whomp, whomp whomp, and then nothing. In the strange silence, the passengers talked in low excited voices, unclipping their seatbelts, reaching for baggage, eager to disembark.

I don’t know if it’s because I knew this place was so ancient – a remnant from another time, a fragment of another Earth – or whether there was something in the place itself that whispered through the eons, some essential nature of the rocks, or the landscape, that made me catch my breath. Whatever it was, I felt I was walking in a different world, full of secrets. These rocks called from a time long gone, when the dark sky was filled with strange constellations, when the world was silent but for the wind whistling across endless oceans, when the air was toxic, but no oxygen-breathing creatures lived to care. And here was I, holding in my hands rocks that were once illuminated by the faint young sun that would grow over the eons to the bright and burning orb that shone down from the lightening sky on this cool Arctic evening almost four billion years later. I turned the cold rock in my hand, and wondered about the silent secrets it kept in crystalline form.

In the lengthening rays of sunlight, I walked to the top of a hill above our camp, and stood together with a colleague looking back toward the east, our long shadows cast thin and stretched across the barren ground. In the distance, we could hear a thundering river of water pouring from under the ice cap on the horizon. Following the noise, I could see a distant waterfall where the freezing river plunged over a precipice and through a dark hole into the ice once more. As the scene darkened around us, the setting sun burst suddenly from under the blanketing stratus, brilliant orange light spilling across the belly of the clouds and reflecting their image back from the surface of the still small lakes scattered below us.