Return to Kanger / short trips around Kanger

This is the lateral moraine from the inland ice as we drove up toward it. One would think after being on the ice for a month, we could stay away for at least one day, but apparently not!



This is me pretending to look significant next to the ice sheet. What a beautiful place!






This shows the texture of the ice near the ice edge. It's perty cool. Well, actually, it's pretty cold. The tents were from another set of scientists doing research near the ice edge.




This is a photo right at the edge of the inland ice sheet. Oh sheet!



Meredith, Lora and I took a bike ride out to the "harbor" in Kanger. This is a photo of me being a dork (shocking) near the harbor. As near as I can tell, the harbor is one building with the primary function of leaving folks behind when they arrive only one hour before the scheduled ferry departure time. But, I guess that's another story...



This is a photo of the KISS science support facility in Kanger. This building houses the scientists and all support staff while we wait for a plane to fly to one of the bases on top of the ice or to fly back to Albany, NY.

Summit Camp II

Well, it's been a while and I'm a little / a lot behind on adding photos to the webpage, but here's a crack at the completion of the photos from Summit Camp. For reference, the summit camp at Greenland is at about 3,200 meters (10,500 feet) above sea level and lies at 72 degrees (too many) North, 38 degrees West. Some other cool basic information about the camp, some photos, and a "virtual photo tour" of the camp are available directly and via links from:

Summit Camp

Golly gee, where to begin when I haven't worked on this in over a month? Photos must be the answer!

This is a nice "sunset" (the closest the sun gets to the horizon) photo with the traditional greenland summit landscape. Seems like a nice place for a summer vacation, no?





Here's another, foggier view of the big house, tents, outhouses and weather ports (heated tents) taken just a bit after the "sunset" photo. I know, I've ALREADY shown photos of Summit Camp buildings, but how much do you really think there is to take photos of up there?



This is a photo of sundogs and a solar pillar on the horizon near Summit Camp (looking toward the skiway). I would love to wax philosophical on how and why sun dogs and solar pillars form, but I am le tired. A short version of the story is they are formed when light is refracted, similar to what happens when a rainbow is formed. Because of the cold, the particles here are all ice crystals and this allows the sun's light to be bent in a particular way. For more on sun dogs and solar pillars, click on these links.



This is a photo of new drill technology in development by the National Science Foundation (and others) for use in Greenland and Antarctica. Technical staff are checking over the equipment including the drill casing (the aluminum "sections"), winch controls and whatnot. You can see the end of the ice core sample inside the drill casing.



Here's a photo of the site where we (the University of Washington group) took a shallow (100 meters depth) ice core. Note the difference in technology between the two sets of coring equipment. In between the recovery of each ice core segment, there's a bit of this less hectic time, standing around, freezing, and preparing things around the site. Way in the background in the upper right, you can see small dots on the horizon--these are the buildings of Summit Camp...



This is how you celebrate at Summit Camp in style. Note the Shultze's Sausage (a favorite Seattle hang out) T-SHIRT and 1/2 of the ingredient list for the most oft ordered concoction there. Don't worry, I would never actually drink this stuff.




Someone constructed a friendly neighborhood igloo. Nice. Makes ya feel almost all warm and fuzzy inside, no?











Here's a photo of the facilities. Not too bad, though some aspects of outdoor bathroom breaks are a little disturbing. One that isn't is the idea of painting the outhouses black, which keeps them significantly warmer when the sun is up (i.e. all the time). Kudos to whoever is responsible for that idea.






Here's a picture of my sleeping arrangements. 'Nuff said.

Summit Camp I

This is a view of the main camp from SATcamp. The big building (the "Big House) is for cooking, eating and hanging out. The tents where I and others sleep (tents?!?!?!?) are the yellowish-orange dots off to the left. Other buildings include scientific labs, a shop and other support facilities. The small and seemingly insignificant black vertical line near the path in the right of the photo is the drill casing for the GISP2 ice core (see next photo).

A zoomed view of the main camp from near the GISP2 drill site (I hope to someday add a little science sidebar talking about the importance of the GISP2 record in understandig climate). It is a "proxy" record of climate over roughly the past 100,000 years and was obtained by drilling through the almost 2 miles of ice below summit camp all the way to bedrock below (an interesting side note is that the weight of the ice on the land in Greenland has submerged the rock beneath below sea level, so the elevation of Greenland's summit is actually just a bit less than the thickness of the ice). The ice retrieved from the GISP2 core was analyzed for a number of different things, but probably mostly significant among them a "proxy" record for surface / ground temperature through time, an isotope of oxygen in the water.

A view of SATcamp from 2/3 of the way from the main camp. Le red shed on the left (a place for red-tinged research and thought). The bally building is on the right where all the noisy pumps, instruments and whatnot are housed. The yellow tent is for those who drank too much coffee with breakfast.



With the plane in the distance and the snowmobile close, this picture represents more activity in ten seconds than occurs in some weeks up here. Note the form of the sled rider. I'm currently lobbying for this to be a new Olympic event.




A (rare) sign of non-human life in camp. This arctic bird (sorry, I don't know what it is) visited SATcamp and our ice core boxes. Not nearly as cool as an arctic fox seen here earlier this season, but still perty cool. The sad thing about spotting animal life up here is that it means chances for survival are slim...



Inside le red shed--the same building viewed in the distance of a previous photo. This is one of the two buildings of the "SATcamp" (satellite camp), which is set up away from the main camp because we are air sampling for trace constituents and we don't want to contaminate our samples with combustion sources (snowmobiles, generators and whatnot) that operate within the main camp.


Seattle folks I was lucky enuff to spend time with while I was up here. Lora on the left is queen of the snowpit--in her case a carefully-dug hole in the snow to test the transmittance of radiation as well as snow properties. Meredith on the right is my main partner in crime while I'm up here. She and I split sampling shifts and other experimental responsibilities up here. Go team!


Some other Seattle folks playing some reindeer games. Shelley on the left and Andrew "danger medic" on the right. Arctic horseshoes plays a bit different than the regular version, as you might expect.




While we were up here, our good friend Julia got married. Though we couldn't tell her in person, we wanted to help her celebrate nonetheless. In the photo from left to right are Aaron, Lora, Shelley (all Univ. of Washington grad students), Jake (yeah, the one with the veil) and Sandy (VECO staff), le Justin (el shorto), Meredith (now a Brown University faculty member!) and Bob (front row). Congrats, Julia and Andrew!!!

Oh yeah! We still celebrate while we're up here. This photo was part of a birthday message from, Gail, one of the other "SATcamp-ers" to her sister (in Peru, I think?!?). The major difference between celebrations "up here" and "down there" is ours are always just a little "off". See exhibit A to the left.




While we're up here, we sample surface snow quite a bit for isotopes of nitrogen. Hopefully I'll get really ambitious and write up a small science tab to this blog, but for now, I've just put this picture up so that you can experience some small part of what we experience up here.



This is a typical landscape photgraph of the summit of greenland. See that polar bear off in the distance? Yeah, just to the left of center just near the horizon. Alright, fine, I'm Just kidding...






Finally, a photo of a halo. You see halos around here on days with thin, but broad high cirrus clouds. Because cirrus clouds are composed of ice crystals (which are all 6-sided), light from the sun is bent through the cirrus clouds, forming a halo. It's basically the same idea as a rainbow, but harder to see in climates where you'd actually want to live...


Alright, even though I'm still a bit behind on posting photos, this is all I can do for the day. We're off to drill an ice core today!

Arriving Summit

So, now that I'm a blogging fool, I guess I'll add some stuff about the camp up here at Summit. I think it'll also make the page look nicer if I use smaller photos, but larger versions (I think) are still just a click away.

Some photos of the journey from Kangerlussuaq to Summit camp is, I guess, in order. First, (another!) photo of the plane, this time in Kanger... It's actually when we arrived, but I guess you knew I was tricky...

This is a photo as we're flying over the icesheet edge toward Summit Camp. How I miss different colors already (and it's only been a week)! White is cool and all, but...

This is a photo taken just a minute or two later from the opposite side of the plane, showing meltponds that exist near the icesheet edge. There are some scientists who have been commenting on the importance of meltponds like these in the observed acceleration of ice transport into the ocean from the icesheet. I only know just a bit more about this, but ask if you're curious.

This is another picture of the icesheet edge showing some of the meltponds (and the propeller! ooh, the excitement!).



Here's a photo of our flightplan into Summit. If you zoom in on the picture, you can see the special arrangement the Air National Guard has made in terms of landing to prevent (as much as possible) exhaust contaminating the air monitoring that occurs at Summit camp.



This is a photo of the co-pilot as we prepare to descend into Summit camp. How come they get all this fancy headgear and I don't?







Our first siting of Summit camp! The small dots at the "bottom" of camp are the tents I'll become intimately familiar with over the next few weeks (tents?!?).



Arrival!

Look at the camera, you idiot!





Ahh, that's better.

Alright, that's all the time I have for now. I'll try and post some photos from around camp in a day or two. le bye bye!

U.S. departure / Greenland arrival

So, um, I have NO idea what I'm doing. I'll try to post some photos from the arrival in Greenland--leaving from Scotia, NY on the Air National Guard flight and then arriving in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland (pretty much on the west coast). Summit photos will come later if this works...

The first image is of the ANG plane as we get ready to depart Scotia, NY.











The second is a photo of most of the folks headed from NY to Kangerlussuaq (it's not as crowded as it looks, I promise). I dare you to guess which seat was mine...









The third picture is of the coast in NE Canada somewhere (my best guess is the coast of Newfoundland?), as viewed from the porthole (is that the correct term for a plane?) window.









The fourth is a photo out the porthole as we arrived at the west coast of Greenland.











The last photo is of Kangerlussuaq. Not very photogenic, at least in this view...