A Well-Oiled Machine: Update from Greenland: Drill Site 3
The following post was written by Luke Trusel (and edited minimally for clarification). After several, well fed and cozy, but cabin fever-inducing days of weather delays in Qarsuut, we were off to our third and final site, Greeland Central! The “GC” site was our first and only site of the year on the Greenland Ice Sheet, situated at 2400 m (7874 ft) elevation. The central part of the name comes from it’s being located centrally between two sites where our group drilled shorter firn cores last year (Work at one of these sites is detailed...
read moreUpdate from the Disko Island Ice Cap and Nuussuaq Peninsula Drilling Sites
Drill Site #1: Disko Island Ice Cap The following post was written by Matt Osman (and edited minimally for clarification). Saturday, May 2nd, 2015 After a pleasant, albeit unintended delay in Ilulissat, we were finally able to make it to our first field site! Following two days of snow and clouds, it happened all at once; on the evening of April 28th there appeared a patch of blue sky on the horizon near Disko Island. Soon after, we were approached by our two (very dedicated) Twin Otter pilots with exciting news of this being the start of a...
read moreSunday 4/26/15 Update
The following post was written by Luke Trusel (and edited minimally for clarification). Sunday, April 26, 2015 Today we flew from Kanger to Disko, but had to turn around at the last minute because cloud cover obscured our site. The pilots dropped us off in Ilulissat and then departed back to Kanger; they were on SAR duty and needed equipment that they were not carrying during our flight. We got several rooms at the Hotel Hvide Falk with the intention of trying to catch a flight the next day in a Norlandair Twin Otter station being used by...
read moreA Sunset in Kangerlussuaq, our Camp on Disko Island, and an Abundance of Thai Food
The 2015 field campaign is on! In the coming weeks you can follow Sarah, Luke, and Oz working on Disko Island, Nussuaq Peninsula, and the Greenland Ice Sheet to drill 3 ~100m ice cores. The following post was written by Luke Trusel (and edited minimally for clarification). Friday, April 24, 2015 This morning, I woke up and met Sarah Das and the rest of the 2015 Disko Bay team at 5:00 AM at a hotel near the Air Force National Guard. Our flight, “Chalk 3,” was set for departure at 10am. An LC-130 from the National Science Foundation...
read more2015 Field Season gets started: An Interview with Luke Trusel and Matt Osman
On April 24th, 2015, Dr. Sarah Das of WHOI (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution), Dr. Luke Trusel of WHOI, and MIT graduate student Matt Osman (Oz), also working with WHOI, began a month-long journey to Greenland, a follow-up trip to build upon a visit taken last April that involved other scientists, including Matt Bingham, a Milton Academy science teacher. Before Dr. Trusel’s and Oz’s departure to Greenland, we were fortunate enough to interview them to better understand the preparations and logistics before and during the trip. Dr. Trusel,...
read moreDisko Bay Project at AGU
Several members of the Disko Bay team presented preliminary findings yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco. According to their website, “With nearly 24,000 attendees, the AGU Fall Meeting is the largest Earth and space science meeting in the world.” The poster, Using Coastal Ice Cap Records to Investigate Maritime Climate and Ice Sheet Processes in West Greenland, was on display in the Moscone West Poster Hall from 1:40-6:00 PM non Monday. Other team members will also be...
read moreNational Ice Core Laboratory
The following post was written by Ashley York. If you’ve been following Matt’s blog, you’ll know that we worked hard in the field this April collecting firn cores and snow pit samples and completing radar surveys at five different sites across west Greenland. But the work doesn’t stop there. Our cores were shipped from Greenland on a ‘cold deck’ flight to the National Ice Core Laboratory (NICL) in Lakewood, Colorado outside of Denver. From June 30 to July 3, PI Sarah Das, her new PhD student Matt Osman (yes, we have yet another Matt joining...
read moreNuus 1 and Ilulissat (take 2)
This past Friday was the last day in the field for our team. Ashley and I were back in Kangerlussuaq and I have posted some photos of a local hike to Instagram Icamera icon on right) The rest of the team, Matt, Sarah, Ben, and Laura headed up from Qaarsut with a new pilot to Nuus1, our second site on the Nuussauq Peninsula. Ben and Laura were dropped off first and they started the normal routine of getting the radar ready and installing the first GPS. They quickly realized that the area had some small crevasses (only a few inches wide),...
read moreHoly _______ ! The continuation of The Most Ridiculous Day Ever at Nuus 2.
You can fill in the blank with whatever you want, but “holy something,” yesterday was spectacular! After sitting in the clouds for two days, we got to sit on the top of those clouds for the whole day. Low coastal and valley cloud was thin enough for Peter to get the helicopter above it and to our first field site on Nuussuaq Peninsula. Ben had identified several sites on Nuussuaq and numbered them. For the last two days we had been talking about which sites to prioritize and “Nuus 2″ got the call. These sites are...
read moreNuus 2 (aka The Most Ridiculous Day Ever)
I know, that is a very tantalizing title for a short post, but it is 11 pm and a longer telling of the days events will have to wait until tomorrow. But here are three photos to whet the appetite: On the flight up to the field site, which is right on top of the dome on the left at the head of the valley system. Grainy iPhone zoom but give a great sense of the drama of the position of the field site. We were way up high on a small ice cap surrounded by mountains that were sticking up out of a much lower layer of cloud. Words can’t...
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