Madcap Ice-Cap Fun in Greenland

[XemaSab]

Ice-core science is incredibly important, because it can help us understand how climate changed in the past — and how it might change in the future. It's also, as the participants in the North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling (NEEM) project will tell you, incredibly fun. Where else can you snowmobile all day across some of the finest piste in the world, carve 200-year-old ice cores in a polar cave that would make Superman swoon, and relax at night (night being relative, since the sun never sets during the Arctic summer) with copious amounts of Carlsberg beer delivered to you by the U.S. Air Force? They didn't tell us it would be like this back in high school biology class.

Getting out to the NEEM project site — on the northwest slice of the Greenland ice cap, some hundreds of kilometers from anything — was less fun. Our ride was a Hercules C-130 cargo plane, which also delivered provisions to the camp, as air travel is about the only way to get on and off the ice cap. It was scheduled to depart Kangerlussuaq at about 6 a.m., which required our group to be out of the hotel by 4:30 in the morning. Getting up at 3:45 a.m., I experienced something entirely new after seven years of international reporting: yo-yo jet lag. Two days ago, I flew six time zones ahead from New York to Copenhagen, then four time zones back to Greenland yesterday. Add in the fact that the sun doesn't set here, and my body thinks it's about 11 p.m., July 23, 1998.

Our early wake-up call wasn't quite necessary — our flight out was, of course, delayed by an hour. Ice-cap flights have an on-time record that makes United's look meticulous, but at least there's an excuse here. Weather in Greenland is changeable, and even in the summer, hardly perfect for flying. It's not unusual for flights to be delayed for hours, even canceled altogether, sometimes stranding people on the ice cap for days at a time. We were lucky — our plane did depart, and landed safely at NEEM some two-and-a-half hours later. There's no paved runway on the ice cap, just a groomed, flat snow path, and the planes don't use landing gear but giant skis. That can make takeoff tricky, if snow has melted and stuck to the skis. After dropping us off, our plane taxied around the skyway for more than an hour trying to reach escape velocity, and finally had to dump 3,000 lbs of garbage it was meant to ferry back from NEEM.

The ice cap is white, blinding and endless. At NEEM we're 77 degrees latitude north of the equator and nearly 2,500 meters above sea level, all of it accumulated snow and ice — some 130,000 years worth, which is what the scientists at NEEM eventually hope to drill through. The polar horizon stretches to all sides without landmarks, save for the black and red flags that mark the boundaries of the camp, the red sleeping tents and the heated main dome, a geodesic wooden structure that is the kitchen, conference center and overall heart of NEEM. The result is scary, when I ponder how tiny and isolated I am against this vast sheet of ice, a white void without plants, animals or even rocks. It's also really, really cool.

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1828971,00.html

[FirstLight]

1. Good story...and well written

I especially like the comment about jetlag! lol

These folks who are watching the ice caps and the melt are heroes, because without their analyses and observations, even fewer people would know the rapid changes in our climate.

I pray they will have lots of ice for years and years to research!