Greenland8
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Witnessing time – from 445 million year old rocks exposed in the Fjords to ~4 thousand year old small ice caps
By Hakim Abdi, LDEO. My first flight on the P3 and the scenery was nothing short of breathtaking. The science mission involved flights in the north over the Steensby glacier that passes through Sherard Osbron Fjord, and Ryder glacier constrained by the Victoria Fjord. In northeast Greenland we overflew the Hagen glacier and the Flade…
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Switchyard Project: New Sampling Record
On May 10, we celebrated the sampling of our 10th station yesterday. These are more stations than we were ever able to get water samples from. Because of the ongoing good weather, we will certainly get one more station today, and hopefully many more during the next couple of days. So watch the posted video and celebrate with…
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Dealing with Mother Nature
Working in the poles we are constantly reminded of our dependence on meteorology, and this project has dealt us a variety of different weather considerations. The most obvious is the weather we experience at the base. Storm season in Thule lasts from the 15th of September to the 14th of May; in other words encompassing…
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Switchyard Project: Sampling Success
The past 1½ weeks have been very successful. Our team from Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory was able to obtain water samples from eight stations, while the team from the University of Washington has already broken their all-time record of the past years of 18 stations. Today (May 7) is actually the first day we can’t fly…
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Transporting Ice From Greenland’s Deep Interior
The North East Ice Stream is a fast-flowing glacier transporting ice from deep in the interior of the Greenland Ice Sheet out to the coast (see image showing a deep penetration into central Greenland). When it reaches the coastline it feeds 79 N Glacier. This area is heavily crevassed, evidence of the rapid ice flow.…
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Switchyard Project: Rescue Operation
Four people who tried to ski from the North Pole to Greenland got stuck on the ice and ran out of food. Since our team was out on the ice for sampling close to their location, we stopped sampling and picked them up.
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Switchyard Project: It’s all about the weather
One can only imagine what kind of a pilot one has to be to fly in the arctic regions and land on sea-ice under weather conditions as we have experienced already – fog above the ice and clouds covering the area with very low visibility.
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Petermann Glacier: At a glacial pace?
We are beginning our focus on the land based ice of northern Greenland. Flying out of Thule places us close to Petermann Glacier situated in Greenland’s northwest corner. The focus of our first flight of this phase of the project (the overall 29th flight of the season!) is Petermann Glacier. Perhaps Greenland’s most newsworthy glacier…
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Switchyard Project: Day 1 – Alert, Alert, Alert
The first day of our operation is usually filled with a lot of work preparing and testing the instruments we brought up here, preparing the airplanes, loading our equipment into the planes, setting up the equipment in the laboratory and preparing the sampling containers. Since our operation requires drilling holes through the sea ice, we…
