Why North Still Pulls

Sanannguavvik. That’s what Inuit call it. It translates to "place for making things". Official Canadian maps call it Alexandra Fjord on Ellesmere Island, the furthest north I had ever been. 

The place feels elemental. Hints of blue in the sky suggest it might clear—but it could just as easily close again. A cold mist drifts low over the water, weaving through scattered ice floes and leaving the mountains seeming to float above it. The air is still. The only sound is the ice floes grinding on the rocky bottom with each swell, not only heard but felt through your feet.

The phrase farthest north lands with force for many—suggesting effort, rarity, and a sense that you have gone somewhere that still requires something of you. It isn’t only explorers or hunters who feel it. It reaches anyone who spends time in high latitudes.

Explorers marked their positions carefully, recording how far north they had come. Those numbers became part of the story, evidence of endurance, ambition, and sometimes survival. Even now, when a latitude is called out, it still carries a trace of that history. The number can feel earned.

But the landscape isn’t organized by that number. It keeps its own measures: how the ice accumulates and retreats, how a current flows at the surface and below, how quickly the sky can turn.

Up here, what matters is movement.

Arctic Ocean water flows south through Nares Strait, carrying fresher surface water and sea ice out of the Arctic toward Baffin Bay. The flow is persistent and often moves ice and water together. Multi-year ice drifts, thickens, locks into place, and breaks apart again as wind presses on the surface and currents mix waters of different temperatures and salinities.

With all that movement, these waters are not unknown. They have long been travelled, named, harvested, and read as part of a lived northern world, shaped in part by movement itself: by the openings it creates, the routes it offers, and the life it gathers.

Inuit ancestors associated with the Thule migration moved into Greenland roughly 700 to 800 years ago, travelling through the Canadian Arctic and into northwest Greenland around the 13th century. Their descendants, including the Inughuit—Inuit of northwestern Greenland, especially around Qaanaaq, and among the northernmost Indigenous populations in the world—developed ways of moving through this region that are grounded in familiarity rather than latitude.

Sea ice is not a barrier but a platform for travel, read carefully again and again. How far north you are matters less than knowing how to move. Snow and wind hold information. Animal movement carries meaning about timing and opportunity. In this worked landscape, routes are not fixed lines, but patterns shaped by conditions.

But it's not all about the ice; it's also about its absence.

For Inuit communities—and for 19th century Scottish and American whalers—the presence of open water between Ellesmere Island and Greenland, in a region otherwise sealed by ice, had long been known. This phenomenon, technically called a polynya, is known to the Inuit as Pikialasorsuaq, while whalers and explorers referred to it as the North Water. Here, open water forms and persists even through winter, as winds and ocean currents continually push ice away from the area. Farther north, in Nares Strait, temporary “ice arches” can span narrow channels, holding back thicker, multi-year ice. When these arches are in place, the opening remains stable; when they break, heavier ice moves south and the system shifts.

From a distance, open water in a frozen landscape can look like a gap. Up close, it feels more like a gathering place. Light reaches the surface earlier here. Nutrients rise. Plankton blooms. Fish congregate. Seabirds gather in numbers that feel disproportionate to the surrounding quiet, and marine mammals follow the edge.

It is one of the most active parts of the High Arctic, and it sits at one of the highest latitudes most travellers will ever reach.

So the question lingers: why does north continue to draw people?

Part of the pull is the number—the idea of reaching a latitude that has long stood for distance, effort, and arrival. It carries weight. You feel it when the position is called out, when you mark how far north you have come.

But being here shifts that feeling. The place does not meet you as a point on a map. It meets you as conditions. Chilled air fresh on the face. Light that stays low, casting long shadows that sharpen form and extend distance. Ice to the horizon that opens and closes the way forward. Sound that carries differently—the wash of water against ice, the creak and shift of pressure within it, the dull knock of floes bumping, a distant raven’s call, and, at times, the soft hiss of wind moving across the surface. 

What the place asks of you is simple and demanding at once: to read what’s in front of you. Routes, timing, and attention begin to matter more than the number that brought you here. 

Hold on to the number. What it means is harder to grasp.

Nature. Culture. Stories.