A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1469 entries
sikussak
Sikussak is very old sea ice held fast in a sheltered fjord, thickened over many years, and behaving more like a glacier than like the moving pack outside. It does not break out annually, it accumulates snow on top, and it can be many meters thick and decades old. Fjords in northern Greenland hold it, and it is one of the oldest ice on any ocean.
Etymology
The word is Greenlandic and it means, roughly, ice like the land or land-like ice, which is a precise description of the thing: Sea ice that has stopped behaving like sea and started behaving like ground. Greenlandic and Inuktitut have supplied a large share of the English vocabulary for ice conditions.
Notes
Sikussak is a habitat as much as a landform. The old thick ice supports a distinctive community underneath it, and it provides a stable platform on which ringed seals build lairs and polar bears hunt. Sediment cores taken through it record how long a fjord has been ice-covered, which is one of the ways the ice history of the far north is reconstructed.