Science Camps and Glacier Watch

Ilulissat, Greenland.

Summer is an intense time for science in Greenland. With 24 hours of daylight to work with and a melting ice cap to study, researchers spread along the edges of glaciers and on camps atop the summit of the ice cap to learn all they can about the dynamic nature of ice, wildlife, climate, and geology in a time of rapid climate change at the poles.

An ice bow stretches over sleeping tents at a scientific research camp on the Greenland ice cap.

The Exploratorium crew will document all the science we can stuff into three weeks. We’ll be camping and hiking with glaciologists, biologists, and climate researchers; recording interviews; writing dispatches; and capturing moving and still image scenes of this gorgeous icy island.

Our first stop will be the town of Kangerlussuaq, nestled along a 100-mile- (160-km-) long fjord with the looming ice cap behind it. We’ll reach Kanger, as it’s often called, via an Air National Guard military transport from Scotia, New York, and we’ll be staying at the Kangerlussuaq International Science Support facility, aka “KISS.”

We hope to catch up with Billy D’Andrea, our Ice Stories correspondent from Brown University, who is studying lake sediments for clues of our recent climate past. We also plan to hitch a ride and hike out to Tom Neumann’s camp along the glacier edge.

The edge of the Greenland Ice Sheet near Kangerlussuaq.

Tom is a glaciologist from the University of Vermont who is interested in the history of the Greenland Ice Sheet, in particular the last time Greenland was free from its mantle of ice. His team studies this by patrolling the edge of the glacier and collecting rocks poking out from the base of the ice sheet. These rocks contain clues about the last time they were directly exposed to cosmic rays from the sun (the last time they weren’t covered by ice).

Near Kanger, we also hope to capture some musk oxen with our cameras, and will almost certainly encounter unwelcome wildlife in the form of marauding Arctic mosquitoes. (Billy says we’ll be eaten alive, which is why we’ve packed mosquito nets and plenty of DEET, an insect repellent).

From Kanger, we fly to the lovely town of Ilulissat, a major tourist and science destination on the island. Ilulissat means iceberg in Greenlandic, and the town is aptly named situated as it is near the outlet of one of the world’s fastest-moving glacier, the Jakobshavn.

Icebergs at the mouth of Jakobshavn Isfjord, Ilulissat.

Jakobshavn is Greenland’s largest glacier and it regularly calves huge icebergs in the summer season, some as large as about a cubic mile in size. We hope to capture one of these gigantic calving events at Mark Fahnestock’s camp along the rocky shoreline of Disko Bay at the base of the glacier. Mark is a glaciologist from the University of New Hampshire, and studies the flow rate of the Jakobshavn glacier. This one glacier, a fraction of the 630,000-cubic-mile ice sheet that covers most of Greenland, produces 35 billion tons of icebergs every year, nearly all the bergs that threaten ship traffic in the northern Atlantic, and is almost certainly the origin of the iceberg that sunk the Titanic.

As a final destination of our Greenland science tour, Lisa Strong will fly with the Air National Guard up to Summit Camp to get a perspective of the ice from the top of the two-mile-thick sheet.