The dusty streets of Iqaluit on Baffin Island may come as a surprise to those who expect a trip to the Arctic, even one made during the region’s brief summer, to be all about ice. All-terrain vehicles and 4x4s trundle along unsurfaced roads between the cheerfully painted buildings of Canada’s youngest, smallest and most remote provincial capital. It has the atmosphere of a Wild West frontier town, straggling haphazardly up the hillsides surrounding Frobisher Bay. The Inuit people’s original interest in the site is given away by its Inuktitut name, meaning “place of many fish”. It was chosen 20 years ago as the capital of the newly minted territory of Nunavut because of its cold war-era US airbase, now converted into a smart little airport. But away from the souvenir shops and the most northerly branch of Canadian coffee chain Tim Hortons, bits of blue and white berg bob by the beach. Here, zodiac inflatable boats wait to ferry passengers out to cruise line One Ocean Expeditions’ flagship, the RCGS Resolute, to begin a voyage across the Davis Strait following a trail of these icy breadcrumbs to their source – the great glaciers of Greenland. Only about 3,000 people a year visit Nunavut on Arctic expedition cruises, and they tend to be slightly older but fit North Americans. Arctic costs are perhaps a little high for all but the most well-heeled millennials , and a visit is perhaps still seen as a little too adventurous by many travellers from newer markets, such as China . But the 160-passenger ice-strengthened Resolute is a little larger and more luxurious than the average polar expeditionary vessel, and once at sea its generous windows offer views of ever-larger slabs of floating whiteness that mirror the snowy table linen in the vessel’s main restaurant. Table service is impeccable and the food well thought out, but the panoramas of rock and ice seem even more remote when viewed from behind a full plate. At tiny Pangnirtung, a huddle of simple buildings halfway up a fiord, shops sell Inuit-carved soapstone and bone, and handwoven fabrics. A small museum displays a traditional summer tent of bearded sealskin sewn with caribou sinew, and elaborate sealskin garments to match, alongside the weaponry of whaling and the story of the arrival of white men. Guillaume Néry’s mission to save the world’s coral reefs The cruise provides additional education from several on-board scientists, some actively engaged in research on changes in ice conditions, wildlife conservation, or in analysing the plastics found in water samples collected by the zodiacs while cruising in search of polar bears. One of these is spotted the next day during a seaborne wander in and out of inlets around Cape Mercy. The coast is grimly impressive – stark, sheer-sided and barren, studded with clumps of ice in sheltered pockets. But all eyes are on the animated whiteness that is the bear, a healthy young male of considerable bulk swimming powerfully around bits of bobbing ice, perhaps in search of a seal snack. The ship cruises further up the coast, with other stops for hikes on land and climbs to viewpoints. It passes great spired cathedrals of floating ice, shaped by cracking and splintering. Some have rounded surfaces, indicating that the water has worn away their undersides until they became top-heavy and tipped over, as can happen repeatedly as they head south. In some cases, the waves have worn away at cracks to create large holes right through them that provide perfect frames for images of further bergs beyond. But once we set out for Greenland across the Davis Strait, the sightings stop. The bergs, carried by the current, mostly follow the coastline, while the Resolute cruises directly across open water, crossing the Arctic Circle. The time is taken up with lectures on photography and seals, cultural talks from Inuit guides, and lessons in ship operations from the captain himself. The bridge is open to passengers 24 hours a day. Up a narrow fiord, the Resolute has to weave between increasing numbers of glistening bergs as vast as toppled blocks of flats, some with skirts of electric blue indicating ancient ice that has been compressed until all the air bubbles have been squeezed out of it. Their origin is the Equip Sermia Glacier, a great wall of fissured whiteness that towers above the ship, the merest tip of one of many fingers extending from the great ice sheet that covers all but Greenland’s fringes. Bushwhacking through Australia’s Arkaba Walk Qeqertarsuaq, the first stop on Greenland soil, is a neat and orderly community of steep-roofed wooden houses that turns out to be typical, looking as if it was airlifted in from Denmark, usually with a church on the highest point, and the distant howls of sledge dogs in the background. Here the ice seems to be treated as slow television, with a row of garden chairs placed along the shore beyond an Astroturf football pitch, providing the best seats in the house for a procession of icebergs passing on their way to Canada. To the south there’s a zodiac cruise to extraordinary cliffs made from slender hexagonal columns of basalt, twisted into swirls by geological forces, and looking like the results of a fire in an organ pipe factory. But the greatest show of the trip is at Ilulissat Icefjord, where the northern hemisphere’s most productive glacier calves more icebergs than anywhere outside Antarctica. A short walk from the harbour through the orderly little town, then along a boardwalk past mosses, grasses and knee-high willows, the land drops away to a wilderness of uneven, groaning ice. A blockage at the fiord’s mouth traps icebergs on their way to the sea, creating a vast, jostling traffic jam, the small gaps between them a gelatinous froth of splinters from earlier collisions. Access to the beach is forbidden as it is extremely dangerous. Need a ‘nakation’? Why clothing-optional holidays are trending When the icebergs tip over or break up they can cause tsunami capable of sweeping walkers away. But a walk inland along the deserted hillside past a panorama of spires and cliffs of ice, spotlit with sunlight through broken cloud, is thrilling. And there’s the added pleasure of assorted bird life and the sight of a young Arctic fox. This glacier was probably the source of the berg that sank the Titanic, and in good weather it’s possible to take a cautious zodiac cruise among those that have broken free, perhaps to discover several humpback whales apparently having an afternoon off. They lie just below the water, only small humps of blackness visible, the fume of their breath drifting over the water in a mixed smell of fish and cabbage. But this spectacle comes with a warning about warming. In 6,000BC, the glacier extended intact to the sea, and the speed bump for departing icebergs today is probably the moraine it created – an underwater barrier of rocks and sediment pushed ahead of the glacier during its original descent. But during the 20th century it retreated inland to the rim of the ice sheet itself. How an overnight train ride to London can take you back to the 1920s After further stops at pretty coastal hamlets only reachable by sea and air, there’s a long cruise up the Kangerlussuaq Fjord, to ride in buses up past another former US airbase that will later provide a flight back to Ottawa, to the edge of the Greenland ice sheet itself. This, too, is in retreat, but remains the ultimate source of the glaciers and their floating offspring, a forbidding broad white stripe across the horizon, but which brings life to the landscape with torrents of meltwater that attract white-rumped reindeer and floppy-eared Arctic hares. So it is indeed all about the ice, but as the volumes of meltwater suggest, perhaps not for much longer. The ice sheet has been melting four times faster than forecast, and within a few decades Greenland truly may be green. Want more stories like this? Sign up here . Follow STYLE on Facebook , Instagram , YouTube and Twitter .