Ittoqqortoormiit: Greenland's Town at the Edge of the Ice

On the east coast of Greenland, at the mouth of one of the largest fjord systems on Earth, lies a town of brightly painted wooden houses, sled dogs, and a few hundred people. Ittoqqortoormiit, meaning "Big-House Dwellers" in the East Greenlandic dialect, is the only inhabited town in all of North-East Greenland, and it has been called one of the most remote settlements on Earth. There are no roads connecting it to anywhere else. For most of the year, sea ice locks the coast, and the town depends on about two supply ships a year to bring in heavy goods, fuel and building materials during the brief open-water season. People come and go by helicopter, connecting to an airport about 38 kilometers away. The town is young. It was founded in 1925 by the Danish polar explorer Ejnar Mikkelsen and about 80 Inuit settlers, mostly from the Ammassalik area around Tasiilaq to the south, brought north on the ship Gustav Holm. The area had once been home to Inuit long before, as archaeological finds show, but had been empty for many years. Its old Danish name, Scoresbysund, came from the English Arctic explorer and whaler William Scoresby, after whom the fjord was named. Life in Ittoqqortoormiit has always revolved around hunting. Residents hunt seals, walrus, musk ox, narwhal and polar bears, and the town's hunters are the only people allowed to hunt in the vast Northeast Greenland National Park. Fishing has never developed much here, because sea ice blocks the waters for so much of the year. The town marked its 100th anniversary in 2025. Its population has fallen by about a third since 2006, and today about 350 people live there year-round. But change may be coming: in 2025, the Danish state decided to fund a new airport at Ittoqqortoormiit itself. For now, the people of the Big-House Dwellers still wait each summer for the ships to break through the ice.