DISKO BAY, Greenland -- It's well past midnight, but the sun is still gleaming just behind jagged peaks, washing the sky with a rosy shimmer. A waterfall gushes from a rocky cleft beneath the downy hood of a glacier. Light glints off the ice floes like sequins scattered on the calm water before us.

No one can bear the idea of going to bed.

"It's just amazing," says Martina Becker, a German woman clinging to the endless day. "Everywhere you look there's ice pouring down. I think this is the most beautiful place I've ever seen."

Someone spots a disturbance in the water ahead, and we dash to the front of the glassed-in deck just in time to see black fins roiling the water. A whale, we suspect.

Or maybe not. In this surreal universe north of the Arctic Circle, possibilities seem infinite.

Our seven-day expedition voyage in western Greenland's Disko Bay takes us into a culture where the "grocery" lies beneath the ice and whale hunting is a survival skill. We'll hike atop the oldest of the earth's crusts and trod on its second-largest ice cap. The glories of a fleeting frozen landscape will surround us - yet we'll be snug in the comforts of fluffy duvets, fresh omelets and the friendly staff of Norwegian Coastal Voyage's MS Fram.

What most Americans know about Greenland is simply that it's big (the world's largest non-continental island), cold (largely covered by ice), and home to a U.S. air base. Until the start this summer of direct flight from Baltimore, fewer than 3,000 Americans per year vacationed here.

But if they've read National Geographic or caught Al Gore's Academy Award-winning film, "An Inconvenient Truth," they also know that the ice cap covering 80 percent of Greenland is melting. How much it will diminish - and how quickly - are matters of ongoing scientific debate. Still, nearly every local has a story of warming temps: a noticeably shrinking icecap, shifting fish populations, a dog-sledding season cut short by three months.

This much seems certain: As ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica warm and glaciers worldwide thin, the sea will rise significantly. Coasts will shift.

Worse-case scenario: Greenland melts, South Florida shores flood.

Though it won't happen quickly - not in this lifetime, or perhaps the next - that scenario seems all the more reason to trade in the gas guzzler, change to energy saver light bulbs. And to get to Greenland before the ironically pastoral name bestowed on it by Viking settler Eric the Red becomes too true.

Greenland's international airport at Kangerlussuaq - known to World War II vets as Sondre Stromfjord - is a simple, pre-fab building in view of Greenland's 1.8-mile-thick ice cap. That proximity plus reliable weather, abundant wildlife and its past as a U.S. World War II air base mean the outpost offers a few extras: swimming pool, bowling alley, museum, motels, a couple of small shops and a surprisingly good pizza parlor. The nearby golf course - one of the world's northernmost - is mostly sand.

Population: A few hundred.

It's our first glimpse of what "expedition" means: a foray into a treeless world where the summer season is so short that most houses are pre-fab, Starbucks is unknown and a village of a few thousand people rates as a city.

Most of the 270-plus passengers aboard this July sailing of the MS Fram have come to see the raw nature of a fast-morphing icescape. Yet Greenland's culture and the daily struggle to survive prove just as memorable.