The last few days have been a flurry of activity as we prepare for the upcoming traverse. Many meetings – mainly revolving around safety, safety protocols, emergency evacuation scenarios, evacuation protocols, emergency communication,…you get the idea. We have finished packing our equipment. It will fill up two pallets plus we have five snowmobiles between the… Read More
The Firncover science team made it to Kangerlussuaq yesterday evening after a long C130 flight from Stratton Air National Guard Base in New York (and a quick stop in Newfoundland). Today the team prepares for the 2016 Greenland field season with communication meetings, runway protocol, checking equipment, logistics, food sorting and palleting. Needless to say, the preparations… Read More
What does field research look like? It’s not always glamorous, despite the beautiful icescapes and rugged living conditions. As a grad student whose research up until a few months ago mostly involved creating numerical models to solve nonlinear partial differential equations, the prospect of designing and building a field setup to measure permeability on the… Read More
A week from today, our FirnCover team assembles in Kangerlussuaq for a month-long traverse across Greenland’s vast interior ice sheet. The majority of prep-work, cargo shipments and customs hassles are done. A page-long “ToDo” list remains on my desk, the odds and ends of prepping science and tidying affairs before 5-6 weeks abroad. But sometimes in the din of… Read More
As the last week arrives, I am sure the rest of the team feels a flurry of emotions and thoughts as I do. Some are still scrambling to do last minute preparations with the equipment as there will be no second chances for shipments. The rush of excitement, the curiosity of meeting new team members that… Read More
Our Arctic Circle Traverse 2016 (“ACT16”) campaign is getting underway next month, and one look at the expedition map and it seems like we’ve outgrown our name! The ACT expedition series began in 2004, as snowmobile traverses roughly aligned with the Arctic Circle (66 °N) in support of the NASA Program for Arctic Regional Climate… Read More
As we enter the last month before we head out on the ice sheet, Most of us have shipped our gear to Colorado where it will then be sent to Albany, New York before it’s final journey to Greenland. I spent several weeks going over my clothing options before settling on the… Read More
Leading a scientific expedition is more about box cutters and budgets than inspiration. Another package arrived in the mail today, 12 rolls of Gorilla duct tape and 500 heavy-duty zip ties. The freight guys just dropped a 300-lb crate of batteries right outside my office door. Anyone know where the pallet jack went? (Seriously, I could use… Read More
One of the main things the FirnCover project studies is the way that increased meltwater has affected the densification of snow into ice on the Greenland ice sheet in a warming climate. In 2012 we made a discovery about the way that recent meltwater in parts of Greenland were rapidly expanding runoff on the ice… Read More
