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Easter Sunday

Posted by on Apr 23, 2014

It is Wednesday and we are on our second day in a row of being shut out by the weather.  Yesterday it was low cloud ceiling and high winds; today the wind has abated but it has been snowing lightly since last night and the clouds are all over the mountains above us.  As I think I have said before, Peter, our A-Star pilot, has to be able to see the ground at all times.  So any cloud scenario that inhibits that view keeps us on the ground.

Yesterday and today, I posted some photos from the Qaarsut area to Instagram (camera icon on the right).  Qaarsut is the closest thing we have seen to what remains of traditional Greenlandic culture so check out the photos of the dogs, drying fish, and frozen seal and whale meat.

Compared to our field days there isn’t much else going on, so . . . I thought I would post something about our Easter in Ilulissat a few days ago.

The day started with the arrival of the Easter Bunny who left some treats outside our doors (see my earlier post for photos!).  We then had a pretty lazy morning before going for a walk around town.  We visited the local museum, the first floor of which is full of Emanuel Petersen paintings.  Apparently he is well known for his paintings Greenland in the early 1900s.  I also like the name.  My maternal great grandfather was Christian Petersen, from Denmark.  The paintings give a good idea of what one would have found in the earlier days of exploration of these areas (at least early exploration of Europeans-the Inuit and Vikings were here well before that).

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Upstairs in the museum were some nice, more modern and abstract paintings and some sculpture.  I especially liked the one shown below of an Inuit face carved from a whale vertebrae.

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After the museum we went to a small local artisan shop that Sarah knew about.  The men working there were all Greenlandic and spoke limited English.  They carved figures, animals, etc from caribou antler, bone, and narwhal tusk.  Sarah and Matt bought a few nice things and I got a kayaker trying to spear a narwhal.

After that we split up and Matt and I walked back out to the “boardwalk” trail at the edge of town to look at the giant icebergs that calve from the Jakobshavn.  We had all been the night before, but it was starting to snow then and we did not see that much.  Easter Sunday, though, was beautiful though and we were treated to an up close and personal look at these monsters.  We even got a “lecture” from a “very knowledgeable” Frenchman about why we did not need to worry about climate change because it is all part of “natural cycles” like sun-spot activity and the tilt of the earth.  That was right after he expounded for a while about how much the Jakobshavn was retreating.  Hmmmm….

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This is the walk out to the view point of the huge bergs.  All that ice in the ocean is ice bergs. 

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This is the main lookout point.  The Jakobshavn Glacier is to the left way up the fjord.  These bergs probably calved off last summer and drifted out here where they got stuck on a shallow spot where the fjord meets Disko Bay. 

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It is hard to appreciate scale here, but that is a tourist boat in front of the berg.  It holds about 25 people. And the photo below is the right hand side of the same ice berg.  And 90% of the berg is under water.  Massive!

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IMG_6360I discovered that I could take a photo with my iPhone through my small spotting scope.

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In the panorama above this berg is just to right of center, so the phone/scope trick works pretty well.  I looked at this one a lot.  To me this is sort of the quintessential ice berg. 

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Matt and I could have stayed all day to look at the ice bergs but we had to meet up with everyone else for dinner.  On the way back to town we passed by the large area where most of the town’s dogs are kept.  These dogs are all for running sleds. In the foreground of the photo below are all the dog “sheds.”  The dogs are all tied up outside in pairs.  They spend the night out curled up in a ball.  They all appeared quite happy in the cold, lounging on the snow.

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Its not quite @dogsinblankets but this guy was really cute.  He seemed to be a stray pup and he looked like he was looking for handouts but was too skittish to come close.  I wanted to take him home and name him Disko!  

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On the way through town I spotted this: laundry on the racks and fish (middle) on the racks.  

After our hike, Matt and I met up with the rest of the gang at the Hotel Ice Fjord for an Easter dinner of local salmon and caribou (reindeer).  When we asked the waiter what the “game of the day” was, he said in broken English-“you know the animal on the front of the Santa Claus sled?”  (Caribou and Reindeer are the same animal but called by different names-Caribou in N. America and Reindeer in Eurasia.)

When dinner was over we made our way down through town to the kayak club of Ilulissat by the water.

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Sarah said that in summer they sometimes have kayaking competitions here.  There is style of kayaking called Greenland style that derives from the techniques developed by the Greenlandic people, who for have historically used kayaks to hunt seals and whales and to travel from place to place.

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Carl and Sam and all my peeps at Osprey Sea Kayak Adventures, these are for you! 

Because we are so far north, the sun sets late and these last photos were at about 9:30.  After that it was back to the hotel to pack for our day out on Disko (see earlier posts).

 

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Tomorrow we should be able to head up to our first Nussuaq site.  As I finish writing the sun is shining in the window of the hotel (at 9:10!) so we are hopeful that the weather has broken enough to fly tomorrow.  We are hoping to hit two sites on Nussuaq in the next two days, but Ashley and I have to fly back to Ilulissat with Peter and the A-Star tomorrow.  A new pilot comes in on Friday and will return to Qaarsut to fly Matt, Sarah, Laura, and Ben up for the last day of field work.  In our original logistics plan Ashley and I were going to fly back to Ilulissat on an Air Greenland flight because the A-Star can only take 4 passengers.  We still have to do a version of that but we are going back with Peter and the other 4 are staying because we lost a couple days to weather.  We will all hopefully get back to Kanger by Friday or Saturday to fly home on Monday.

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Marathon Monday

Posted by on Apr 22, 2014

We didn’t run 26.2 yesterday but a shout-out to all our Boston friends who did.  Today was the Boston Marathon and while the elite runners were leaving Hopkinton, the Disko team was headed for Disko Island.  After our aborted flight on Saturday and a nice down day for Easter, we were looking forward to a good weather day, and today did not disappoint.  It was blue sky and sunshine, just like our ice sheet days and even a little warmer, only – 17 C when we landed!  Like Saturday we decided that Ben, Laura, and I would go first as the radar team.  That would give us a chance to get started on the radar, which has tended to take longer than the coring and snow pit work.  A grid pattern around our landing site would also allow Ben to give us a good idea of whether there might be hidden crevasses under the snow that would pose a safety risk (there were not).  Because we were unsure of the crevasse danger we had decided to take a party of three as a rope team.  So Ben, Laura, and I geared up with harnesses and glacier travel equipment and boarded the helicopter with all the gear we needed for the radar surveys.

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An hour later, a spectacular helicopter flight over Disko Bay and the eastern part of Disko Island put us on the ice cap on top of Disko.  We overflew the site once and then Peter, our Danish pilot, gingerly put the A-star down on the snow.  Landing on snow, he told us, can be delicate because the helicopter can sink into deep snow.  The snow here was firm though and we touched down without a problem.  Just to be sure Peter packed the snow with the ski skids by gently “bouncing” the helicopter on the snow surface.

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Once we had unpacked and moved our gear pile a respectable distance from the chopper, Peter fired it up again and lifted off to go back for the rest of the team, leaving Ben, Laura, and me on the southern Disko Island ice cap, a site we had named “Disko South” (last week we had decided not to visit Disko North because Ben’s recent analysis of satellite imagery was that it was too heavily crevassed).

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Honestly, that was pretty cool-to be alone on top of the island.  Just the three of us with no one around for miles.

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But it was time to work so we set to it!  Laura got to work on the first GPS station.  To install the GPS, we drill a hole with a power drill and insert a bamboo pole in the hole.  A UFO shaped GPS antenna is then placed on top.  Once connected to the battery and GPS unit, which are inside a big Pelican case, this set up will record the position of the pole at the millimeter scale.  By leaving it running for 20-30 minutes, or longer, Ben can get an idea of how fast the glacier is moving.  (Laura uses similar units for another project on the Greenland Ice Sheet melt-water lakes-her units are left out for a year and are powered by solar panels.  She will be going to collect them this summer. )

While Laura worked on the GPS, Ben got his radar systems set up, and I probed the area with an avalanche probe to look for hidden crevasses.  We were pretty sure that the ice cap was crevasse free, but we needed to do our due diligence.  I also laid out the climbing rope such that Ben and Laura could tie in at each end with me in the middle.  When Ben was finished we set off with him towing the ground penetrating radar (GPR) which gets good imagery of the shallow snow layers, me towing the ice penetrating radar (IPR) which can measure ice thickness all the way to the bed, and Laura towing a sled with another GPS in its big Pelican case, bamboo, and the drill.

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 That is Ben working in the front with the orange ground penetrating radar. 

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And Laura in the back with the mountains of Disko Island behind. 

 For the next 1-2 hours we walked a big grid around our gear pile, finishing shortly after Sarah, Matt, and Ashley arrived with Peter.  It was fun to watch the helo come over, bank around, and touch down in a cloud of snowy rotor-wash.

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After a break in the helicopter, I did a little coring with Matt and Sarah and then Laura and I helped Ashley finish digging out the snow pit.  This pit went down to 1.6 m before we hit a hard ice melt layer.  The snow above the ice layer, with the exception of the windblown slab on the surface was largely recrystallized into large ice crystals, the texture of very coarse sugar.  Shoveling it was relatively easy, but if you threw it too high behind the pit the wind would blow it right back on to you!

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By this time Ben was ready to head out for more geophysics work so we roped up again and then worked steadily for about the next ~4  hours doing more grid lines up and down the ice cap.  The cap here has a gentle slope and Ben wanted to go up and down the ice flow lines.  Even though it was just a gentle slope up, it was hard work especially because the snow surface was variable-sometimes hard, sometimes soft.  We were frequently breaking through the snow 4-5 inches which made for something of a slog.  By the time we were done the other team had left on the first chopper ride down to Qaarsut.  We had about ½ hr to regroup while we waited for our pick up.  We were pretty beat from 5+ hours of trudging through the snow pulling sleds.  So while we didn’t run a marathon on Marathon Monday, it felt like it by the end of the day! The physical labor and the odd combination of both relentless cold and sun really takes it out of you.  We did take a moment to pose for #GlobalSelfie, an Earth Day project by NASA.  We posted it today on @goodnesglacier, Laura’s Twitter.  NASA’s IceBridge data was instrumental in helping Ben pick the specific coordinates for our field sites as well as the radar survey lines.  Before we departed “Disko South” we flew about 1 km up the ice the retrieve one of the GPS set-ups.  It is pretty cool how quickly the A-Star can start up, fly some place, and shut down again.  Had we all had a little more helicopter experience, Peter said he would have just kept the rotors turning while one of us jumped out and retrieved the GPS.

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Cold air makes your breath instantly freeze to your hood, and your mustache.

From Disko to Qaarsut was about 45 minutes and it was probably the most amazing flying experience of my life.  On this trip alone we have flown a C-17, a Twin Otter which we landed on the ice sheet and landed on a runway with a ski that would not come up, a King Air, and now the A-Star.  I have flown in a small fixed wing and a helicopter through the mountains of New Zealand and I have flown in a helicopter through the Swiss Alps.  Those were both amazing but this flight was over the top.

First we flew over the northern part of Disko Island and then out over the ocean towards the Nussuaq Peninsula, crossing varied sea ice and a few ice bergs.  Nussuaq is much more dissected by glaciation compared to Disko and the mountains were craggy and beautiful, with horizontal volcanic layers making it look like the peaks of the Canadian Rockies

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Leaving Disko to cross the fjord to Nussuaq

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Cloud layer rolling up the fjord from the west. The prow shaped mountain crag in the middle is in the next photo as well. 


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Every time we crossed over a mountain pass we were treated to yet another spectacular valley often with a glacier spilling down into a valley.  The A-Star is slow compared to most other aircraft and it flies low; couple that with a wide windscreen and you get a unique ride through spectacular wilderness terrain.  It was unbelievable.  And just when we through it couldn’t get better, we swooped down to the Qaarsut airport which sits on the northern edge of the peninsula looking out across a wide fjord to massive fortress-like, cliff-faced islands on the other side. Very dramatic!

IMG_6551Coming in to the Qaarsut airport

We were told ahead of time that we would be staying at a small place (maybe a hotel, maybe a place that puts up pilots) near the airport; it turns out to be a wonderful little hotel run by Ip Larsen with private rooms and bathrooms and a great common room with a view out over the ocean.  It was so nice to end a very long day with a hot shower, an excellent home cooked meal, and a nice warm bed!  After downloading photos and writing part of this blog, I clicked this last photo right before bed, at 10:15 pm!

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The Easter Bunny

Posted by on Apr 20, 2014

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The Easter Bunny found us in Ilulissat!  We were all sleep deprived but most of us were awoken by the first Easter service of the morning at the church down the street.  Sometime between 7-8 am they rang the church bell to signal either the start or the end of the service.  That sets off the sled dogs in town.  So there was an interesting wake up call of church bells with a background chorus of dog howling!

Happy Easter and good luck to all the runners tomorrow!  Hope you have a nice day.

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Planes, Helicopters, Dogs, and Icebergs

Posted by on Apr 20, 2014

It’s snowing again.  If this was a ski town, tomorrow would be a sweet powder day.  Greenland in April!  It is most definitely still winter here though there are plenty of signs of Arctic spring.  The open ocean is free of sea ice (mostly) and the days are very long.  Even at midnight last night I could still see light in the sky behind the mountain ridge out my window.  Why was I up at midnight you might ask?

 

Well the last few days have been exciting and busy.  If you have been reading, you know that Thursday it was also snowing and we were pinned down in Ilulissat.  Friday we had planned to head up to our second ice sheet site around 1-2 pm, but the weather was clearing faster and the pilots told us to pack up ASAP, so we scrambled a little faster than we anticipated and got over to the airport.  As you can see in my Instagram photos (click the camera icon to the right), going to the airport is a little different.  We just drove right up to the plane and loaded our gear.  We had about an hour flight up to site number 2 and the further inland we flew, the better the weather got.  With the recent weather there was a little more moisture in the air and we could see our plane shadow on the ice sheet with a long straight shadow line stretched out behind-our contrail.Like last time, we landed on the ice and got to work.  Friday’s work was just like the last field day, but much warmer, minus 25 C instead of minus 32!  Still cold but it felt a lot warmer, at least at first.  Ben and Laura set off to do the geo-physics (GPS measurements and radar surveys), Ashley and I started the snow pit (but when they were done putting the “pajamas” on the Otter engines, the pilots went to town on the pit and dug a full 2m pit), and Sarah and Matt E (and yours truly a little) worked on the core.  By the end of the day we had sampled the whole pit (plus a few extra samples for my students at home), drilled 9 meters of core, and walked 6km of radar transects.

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As you can see in the photos the moisture in the air made a very cool sun halo that I had fun playing with with the camera.  We left the ice about 7:30 pm and about 30 minutes into the flight back to Ilulisaat, the pilots told us that we would have to divert to Kangerlussuaq because one of the skis would not retract.  We would have to land on two wheels and one ski, which they assured us was not a big deal, but did require a longer runway.  The Ilulissat runway is quite short-only suitable for small prop planes-while the Kanger runway is long.  So we flew south to Kanger, and, sure enough, the landing was uneventful other than some sparks from the ski on the pavement.  The airport fire crew and the police had turned out though and, when we taxied to the tarmac, they all gathered round to have a look at the ski.

For us, this meant that it was now about 9:30, we had not eaten anything in a while, and all we had was our gear for the field because we were now several hundred miles south and an hour plane flight from our hotel.  Fortunately KISS put us up for the night and Jeff from Polar Field Services met us at the airport and shuttled us and our gear back to KISS for the night.

Our Otter pilots, who are from Iceland, were scheduled to be picked up at 8 am to be flown back to Iceland, so they arranged for that plane to shuttle us back up to Ilulissat and then return to Kanger to get our Otter pilots and fly back to Iceland.  So this morning we were up at 6 to pack back up and head to the airport.  We were not sure if all our gear from the Otter would fit in the new aircraft, a Beechcraft KingAir, but it did, and so we flew up to Ilulissat.

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We were scheduled to fly to a field site on Disko Island today and had a helo booked, so as soon as we arrived we had to regroup and arrange equipment for that field site.  Unlike the ice sheet, this site is on a smaller ice cap and the terrain is largely unknown, other than to Ben who has poured over high resolution satellite imagery of the ice.  We are pretty confident that there are no crevasses in the area (based on the satellite imagery) but we need to be careful, so we got all our glacier travel equipment ready (harnesses, ropes, anchors, hardware, etc).  We also needed to organize a fresh set of coring and sampling supplies.  By about noon we were ready to fly and Ben, Laura, and I boarded the A-Star helicopter with our Danish pilot, Peter.  We had determined that we would be the most experienced rope team in case of crevasse danger and, because the chopper can only carry three of us at a time, we would go out first and do a quick box grid of the landing area with the radar to be sure it is crevasse free before the coring team arrived on the second flight.  So off we went, flying out over Disko Bay toward Disko Island.

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It was a beautiful day . . . but not on the island.  As we got closer and closer, it became clear that the island was mostly shrouded in cloud.  Peter tried to find some holes in the clouds and even took us up to 8000 ft to look over the cloud deck but the ice cap on Disko was socked in and we had to return to Ilulissat.  We did get a nice flight over the ocean with its myriad of different sea ice textures and took a pass past on the massive ice bergs out in the bay on the way back, but we were all bummed to not be out doing our science work.

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It is clearly a lot of work to get here and get all the logistics set up so we are eager to do the work we came to do.  At the same time, it has become clear to all of us (Sarah knew this already) that there always has to be a plan B, and C, and occasional D.  As Sarah said today, plan A is always the best one, but you always have to have a backup.

So we were all back in Ilulisaat by about 2:30.  We returned to the hotel and then decided to go for a walk through town and out to the tip of the peninsula that Ilulissat sits on.  From there you can see the huge ice bergs that come out the Jakobshavn fjord.  They get stuck on an old underwater moraine where the fjord meets Disko Bay and there they sit and slowly melt until they are no longer grounded (stuck on the bottom) and can float north on a counterclockwise current around Disko Bay.  When we first arrived, a long flat berg was behind the hospital out on the little point near our hotel.  Two days later it has drifted out in front of us.

Our hike took us out of town past the many dog teams that call the outskirts of town their home.  Most are used for tourist operations, but at one point in time, dog teams were the primary mode of transportation of the Greenlandic people.  There were probably a hundred dogs out there and at one point many of them started howling like a pack of wolves.

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We hiked out to the point but by the time we got there it was snowing pretty steadily and the nice sunny day from the morning was gone.  The clouds we ran into early in the helo ride had pushed across the bay and descended on us.  We could still see the huge bergs but they loomed in the gray cloud and snow rather than shimmering in the sun like they had earlier in the day.

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Now that it is after dinner, it has probably snowed 4-5 inches of fluffy powder.  Matt, Sarah, Laura, and Ben are playing cards.  Tomorrow the Easter Bunny comes so we have a down day for the holiday.  We plan to head back to Disko on Monday, weather permitting of course! If not, plan B . . . .

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Ice Sheet Site 2

Posted by on Apr 19, 2014

Yesterday we thought we thought we were going to have to wait out some weather but it cleared quickly and we got out to the ice sheet again. After a long day of work we headed back to Ilulisaat but a damaged ski on the plane forced us to head to Kanger instead. After a night here we are up early to fly back to Ilulisaat to catch our helo charter out to Disko Island. Check out the Instagram photos from yesterday. Limited Internet and time means a short post!

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