Bui Xuan Viet of Dong Nai Province, southern Vietnam, traveled to Greenland in early July to photograph the midnight sun and floating ice giants.
To Viet, Greenland felt like a coastal town where life revolves around the sea. Even in summer, temperatures hovered between 2 to 5 degrees Celsius, and the weather was unpredictable.
To capture the midnight sun, he boarded a boat headed into the bay, where the view was clearer than from the mainland.
Some icebergs, he noted, were as large as islets. One in particular had a stream cascading down its side like a miniature waterfall.
“It’s million-year-old pure water, refreshing and crystal clear,” he said after taking a sip.
Most of the icebergs drifting through Greenland’s bays have broken off from the Greenland Ice Sheet, the largest body of ice in the Northern Hemisphere. It contains around 90% of the region’s freshwater and is second in size globally only to Antarctica’s ice sheet.
According to Greenland Travel, about 90% of an iceberg’s mass lies hidden beneath the water, leaving only 15% visible above the surface, a fact that gave rise to the saying “just the tip of the iceberg”.
Icebergs from Greenland can drift as far as the waters off New York, reaching Bermuda or even Ireland. It can take four years for them to melt completely. The iceberg that sank the Titanic also originated from Greenland.
Viet said the midnight sun itself was not as dramatic as he had imagined and the scene was more like an endless golden-hour glow. But an unexpected encounter stole the show: the sight of a tail splashing beside an iceberg, the gesture of a humpback whale.
"That moment felt like a gift."
Though he had already visited a whale-watching safari in Greenland, nothing compared to the thrill of spotting two humpbacks right in the bay.
"That plume of mist lit by the midnight sun, who knows when I'll get a shot like that again."
Humpback whales can grow 15–17 meters long and weigh up to 35 tons. They are easy to recognize by their five-meter-long fins, round heart-shaped bodies that can be about three meters across and a habit of leaping out of the water and landing with a loud splash.
From April to November these whales feed on krill and small fish in Greenland's coastal waters and fjords.
Humpbacks are also known for producing the most intricate songs in the animal kingdom, melodic sequences repeated over and over to communicate with one another across distances of hundreds of kilometers.
