Wednesday, 10:22 PM West Greenland Time
Kangerlussuaq
So, a whole hell of a lot has happened and today (by which I mean yesterday, plus today, plus a little bit of the day before that….it all blends together here) has been very long, very involved, and a lot of stuff worth writing home about has happened. So, I’ll give you a chronological catch-up as best as my memory can provide.
To begin, we land in Copenhagen.
The country looks like a miniature golf course. Rivers, lakes, ponds, islands, little houses…all it’s missing is a windmill and a giant scary clown face with a obscenely long tongue and the illusion would be complete. Didn’t see much of the city, but it airport is very cool. The passport check-in line was very efficient, though you ultimately ended up going through about 5 airlock-type doors and turnstyles before getting to baggage claim. Scenes from “The Bourne Identity” kept going through my head. So, we’ve arrived, and we’re in a hurry. We have to get our baggage, re-check into Air Greenland with those bags, go through security, and get to our gate. We had about 55 minutes in which to accomplish this. Obviously we made it because I’m here now, but it was something of a close call. It would have gone faster if the gate where we arrived and the departing gate of Air Greenland hadn’t been in an entirely different terminal than the Air Greenland check-in counter. What’s more, our arriving and departing gates were RIGHT NEXT to each other… ah well, such is life with airport security.
So, we get on the plane, all sweaty and straining, and I’m sat in the middle of a 4 seat row with 3 strangers while the rest of my party is up a head of me in a center row with only 3 seats. Ugh… This is bad news. Not only do I not get an aisle seat (which I usually prefer), but I can’t even see out of the windows, the plane being in a 2 x 3 or 4 x 2 arrangement of seats. The flight begin as normal and was unremarkable…except that the airplane safety briefing was this animated feature delivered in spoken Greenlandic with subtitles in Danish. (Lonely Planet says that most TV programs in Greenland are dubbed in Greenlandic and subtitled in Danish…because Greenlandic words are too long to make good subtitles.) So. I read a bit more of my book, listen to some music, eat the meal the provide (which was actually quite good) and go try to sleep as much as I can. It works, because when I wake up some time later, we’re descending into Kangerlussuaq.
We walk from the plane to the terminal and immediately upon entry, after passing the drug sniffing dog, I’m pulled aside and placed behind a black curtain with some other passengers, a few more of whom trickle in as the plane continues to empty. Apparently, they do the random searches here AFTER you get off the plane. Unfortunately, I chose to sit in the wrong corner of the holding area and was the last person to be searched. No big deal, and nothing at all to be nervous about…but a noteworthy experience nonetheless.
Of course, they could have taken their sweet old time with it. It took at least another 25 minutes for our bags to come through. Though it’s the largest in Greenland, Kangerlussuaq airport is NOT that big. The luggage should have been out in less than 2 minutes. Apparently, they were in the process of training a bunch of new policemen and drug dogs, and so were doing thorough, instructive inspections of the bags back behind the carousel. Occaionally, a curious dog not quite clear on his obedience duties would poke his head our and / or walk onto the public side of the carousel. Cute.
Thankfully, Kangerlussuaq (Airport code SFJ, very close to SFO, and named thus for the town’s old Danish name: Søndre Strømfjord) was our final destination, so we didn’t have to worry about other connections or luggage transfers.
Our hosts from KISS (Kangerlussuaq International Science Support, administered by VECO Polar) met us at the airport including our quasi-official guide for the trip, a man named Kim “Safety” Peterson. I suppose “Safety” is a good name to have in a potentially harsh environment such as this! So, Kim et al. load us up into a truck and drive us across town (which takes about 2 minutes at 40 kilometers per hour…it’s a SMALL town). We get our room keys, have our initial conference about the week’s activities, and then, FINALLY, we’re able to drop our luggage, unpack, and partake in a much needed shower, shave, and tooth brushing. Feeling human again, I make use of the KISS wireless internet to re-establish contact with the outside world and get my bearings before we head out to town for a quick tour. The tour doesn’t take long, but Kim points out the post office, the airport café (where we grab a meal a bit later on), the general store, the ‘Christmas Store’, the swimming pool, and the bowling alley. Kangerlussuaq is the Greenlandic equivalent of Club Med. Since this whole town used to be Bluie West Eight, a US military outpost from WWII until the end of the Cold War, it’s got a lot of amenities as befits such a base. We also go to the VECO polar holding buildings and verify that our shipped equipment has all arrived safely. We acquire a few more items (generator, large tent, fuel cans) from VECO and are ready to head out.
The tour completed, we return for an hour and a half sleep, which did the body a LOT of good…though I still hadn’t had a full night’s sleep in a bed since Saturday night in Los Angeles. (That is, if you can call the events at Spa Night ‘sleep’ ;-)). Finally, we drive over to VECO, meet up with our heavy equipment mover, and load up to go out to the ice.
The mover is a two segment, track-driven, snowcat-looking thingy which gives a very bumpy ride, but can navigate just about any terrain of rocks, water, ice, and snow. They should send one of these to Mars. It would be awesome!
That’s all for now. More about the trip to the Ice, the ICE itself, and our first day of experiments later.
Entry 4
10:09 am Greenland Time
Ice Cap road, East of Kangerlussuaq
Greenland has no roads. Sure, there are paved streets in the middle of the towns, but between settlements there is no means of overland transport in the summer. In the winter, one can use snowmobiles to move between places like Kangerlussuaq and Sisimiut (the capital of the municipality of the same name, of which Kangerlussuaq is a part). Snowmobiles can get up to 120 miles per hour, so can be a pretty efficient way of getting from A to B. Especially if you don’t need to carry a lot of cargo. It’s the Arctic equivalent of motorcycles, except here the ‘riding season’ is in the winter.
As a consequence of Greenland having no roads, there’s no car rental business. So a major concern of our coming out here is how we would get a vehicle to use for our frequent trips to and from the Ice Cap along the Ice Cap road (a rather bumpy gravel road which is, in fact, the longest in Greenland at 25 km). Fortunately, our quasi-guide “Safety” Kim leased us his personal vehicle for the 10 days we’re here: A nice green Land Rover with permanent 4-wheel drive.
So, as Hermann drives he and I out to the cap to relieve Oded and Kevin, I reflect on my first and continuing impressions of the ice-free Greenland landscape.
The land here is old. Very old. The moss-colored hills on the far side of the Akuliarusiarsuup Kuua (the low, sandy wash which drains part of the glacier and joins the tip of the Kangerlussuaq fjord) look strikingly similar to images I’ve seen of the Scottish Highlands. I’m sure there’s some connection between the rocks of Greenland and those of the northern British Isles and Scandanavia. Perhaps they were all part of the same craton before the rifting of the Mid-Atlantic ridge.
The vegetation is low, constrained by the thin soil which has scaercly managed to form over the glacier-scoured rocks since the last Ice Age. It hangs now, tenuously, onto the slick faces of bare rock, sloughing, wrinkled, down to the base of the hills like so much rotted skin. It is an ooze lapping against the sides of the steep mountains, leaving them bare and exposed above. Up close, the slopes reveal a hummocky texture, like the skin of a basketball….little hills of moss and grass covered soil about a foot across thrown up by decades of frost-heave.
Here and there, pretty patches of a small purple-pink flower add a barely perceptible dash of color to the otherwise dull green, yellow, and grew landscape. It’s beautiful, but old. Fragile, like a cracking oil painting.
On the horizon looms what looks to a former San Franciscan like a low bank of fog, hovering on the hillcrest between the coast and the valley. But unlike the roiling fog terminus, this wall of white doesn’t move on a human timescale. Unlike Illulissat up in Dasko Bay, the pressure of the Northern Hemispheres largest ice cap is sufficient only to push the Russel’s glacier forward at a barely perceptible rate. And global warming has been causing the whole cap to retreat for the past 30 years. Illulissat, however, remains the world’s most productive glacier, calving of enough fresh water each day to provide for a year all of the needs of New York City.
We have passed many lakes on the way to the cap, ranging from tiny ponds in small saddle depressions between two small hills to the very large Aujuitsup tasia, which is about 10 by 2 km. Any map of the area shows innumerable lakes, all elongated along the direction between the ice cap and the ocean: the direction of glacier advance. It looks a bit like a map of Minnesota. I’ve also seen some waterfalls, again ranging in size from barely a trickle to impressive cataracts.
As we approach closer, I see the cracked and dirt-streaked face of the ice cap. In places, water from the base of the glacier pours down over the rocks and into the wash on its way to the sea. We drive up onto the terminal moraine, a mass of rocks and debris plowed ahead in front of the glacier. From here, we leave the Land Rover behind and walk ahead of the snow cat, which follows us as we search for a good spot to drill. We want to reach at least 60 meters, so we have to be sure we’re far enough above the bedrock for that.
As we walk over the ice, the mineature-golf impression strikes me again. The surface of the glacier is carved into many small rivulets flowing over the surface. We are told by Kim that all of this was ‘blue ice’ last winter. Most glaciers and old ice caps have ice which is blue due to trapped bubbles that get compressed to a certain size when the cap gets thick enough. Blue ice is old, dense, and exactly what we want to drill through. But now, the upper 20 centimeters is a loose, partially melted icepack. It is similar to ‘firn’, a term which refers to first-year snow over ice which is porous, loose, and crunches underfoot. But this is not recent snow – it’s rotting ice.
The rivulets, running in windy paths, beautifully meandering with frequent ponds and confluences are at most a foot and a half wide. They’re easy to step over, and it’s kind of fun to hop back and forth along their courses. In places where the flow is slow, there’s a thin covering of mud on the blue ice below the water level. Decades of accumulated wind-blown dust falling down as the ice beneath it melts, collecting in the ponds to eventually contribute either to the moraines or to the silt load of the glacial rivers.
After about 20 minutes of searching, we find a decent spot at the top of a small snow divide.
It’s a hill with sharp drops on either side, a nearby flat space for our secondary tent, and another nearby depression for the generators. We can also get some good ‘hero’ shots by looking up from the valleys below. We unload the snow cat and set up our main and secondary tents. The former is a 10×10 foot yellow thing with a high ceiling. The other is a simple 2-man, 3-season tent. We plop down our boxes of equipment, do a bit of unpacking, declare first-day victory and head home. Of course, this account is vastly shortened. It actually took us about 3 hours on-site to get as much done as we could before calling it a day.
On the trip back, I slept. Then, arriving back in Kangerlussuaq, I shower again, make the brief entry y’all saw before, and hit the sack. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
