I interviewed Joe at Summit Camp last July, on top of the Greenland ice sheet. We stood right next to an ice core bore hole that produced an important core in 1993. The Greenland Ice Sheet Project Two (GISP2) core gives science an ice record back 100,000 years. Joe’s team has done additional, higher resolution cores that go back 500 years to see how changes in pollutants might have affected climate and human health.

Joe’s research was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science in 2008. Click here to see the paper: http://www.pnas.org/content/105/34/12140.full

In this second video, Jeaime describes his own journey from computer technician to polar researcher and some of the outreach work he does with students in his local community of Elizabeth City, North Carolina. (Videos by Lisa Strong-Aufhauser.)

If you thought ice sheets were just large blocks of slowly melting frozen water, think again. They are dynamic, ever-changing seas of ice that grow from fallen snow at the top, move in ice streams, lurch suddenly in “ice quakes” and flow toward the ocean where they break off in calving events, both large and small.

Ice sheets are also one of the “black boxes” of climate change, because scientists don’t know how they will respond to global warming or even have detailed information about the normal range of their dynamic behavior. It’s important to understand how stable, or unstable, ice sheets are in a warming world because their loss could mean catastrophic sea level rise that would flood world-wide coastal communities.

CReSIS is an international, 10-year project funded by the National Science Foundation to gather data about ice sheet dynamics using an arsenal of tools from satellite imaging, to airplance instrument surveys, to research on the ground. The research in Ilulissat is centered on surface mapping and ice-mass balance using a suite of instruments on a twin-engine airplane, the Kenn Borek Twin Otter.

In this video, we talk with Earl Frederick of NASA about the ice-mapping flights over the Greenland Ice Sheet. Stay tuned for an interview with Jeaime Powell, a member of the data-analysis team from Elizabeth City State University, a partner with the University of Kansas. (Video by Lisa Strong-Aufhauser.)

Here, Dr. Fahnestock describes the roar of a 1000-foot iceberg dropping off the Jakobshavn into the Ilulissat Icefjord. Watch time-lapse photography of this massive calving event.

What controls the speed of Greenland’s big outlet glaciers like the Jakobshavn? How do they interact with the climate system? And most importantly, what does the future hold for the glaciers of Greenland? In this video, Dr. Fahnestock discusses glacier dynamics and what he hopes to learn through his studies. (Videos by Lisa Strong-Aufhauser.)

The Jakobshavn is an outlet glacier, one of the few places where the giant Greenland ice sheet can shed ice in the form of gigantic icebergs. Sometimes up to a cubic kilometer breaks off the glacier into the sea in one massive iceberg calving. In this interview, Mark describes some of the physics of this speedy glacier and why so many scientists are interested in studying the dynamics of Jakobshavn. (Video by Lisa Strong-Aufhasuer.)

We’ll post more of our interview with Dr. Fahnestock in an upcoming dispatch with footage of one of the giant calving events.

We had arranged a helo ride out to Mark Fahnestock’s research camp and had been hoping to stay out there for a few days in tents, but it turned out we couldn’t get a return flight so we had to scrap the camping adventure. That also meant that this two-hour visit would be our only chance to see Jakobshavn from a vantage point right next to its calving front where the glacier drops huge icebergs into the sea.

Our helicopter pilot, Morten Haeurbach from Denmark, flew us through some beautiful icebergs on our way back from the Jakobshavn Glacier.

The helicopter ride was thrilling, not least because a strong wind buffeted our landing and Morten, our helicopter pilot, had to make two approaches. We jumped out, said ‘Hi’ to Mark, and then got out of his way. To scientists, helicopter work can be a stressful necessity as fuel and flight time are limited for them to accomplish their tasks. If they don’t finish before the helo has to leave, a year’s worth of data collection could be jeopardized. So Lisa and I left Mark and his colleague to their work, which gave us a chance to walk around the bluff overlooking the 450-foot face of this magnificent glacier. I had heard that huge icebergs a cubic kilometer in size can calve off this very spot and was really hoping it would happen while we were there with our cameras… but that was pushing it since events of that size happen at the rate of just one a week.

The vertical calving front of the Jakobshavn Isbrae stands 450 feet tall.

Mark Fahnestock, a glaciologist from the University of New Hampshire, has been studying the Jakobshavn glacier for over five years and has been there in person for many huge calving events (he promised to share footage with us if we don’t catch one ourselves). In the early 2000s, the glacier started speeding up and it’s currently moving twice as fast as previous measurements. Scientists aren’t exactly sure why, but they’ve implicated a few suspects. I know what you’re thinking: global warming. But simple warming doesn’t explain the mechanics of glacier flow or the observations that scientists have made the past few years including surface melt breaking through and lubricating the base of the glacier (the work of Sarah Das and Ian Joughin), warming ocean temperatures undercutting the ice, and the loss of the ice tongue in summer that had been serving as a kind of dam holding back the Jakobshavn.

To get a better handle on how global warming might be impacting the dynamics of glacier flow, Mark has been outfitting the Jakobshavn with instruments including GPS and surveying tools and pointing multiple cameras at its face to document calving events. He’s interested in whether these large events are a local phenomena along the calving front or whether they involve larger portions of the Greenland Ice Sheet. Like other glaciologists, he is also interested in the contribution of glaciers like the Jakobshavn in shedding ice from large ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica and whether this loss is being accelerated.

On the day we visited his camp, Mark and his colleagues were placing 10 tripod-mounted reflectors on the ice that will be used to track the relative speed of the glacier using a sophisticated Swiss surveying instrument called a theodolite. We watched as they picked up three reflectors at a time and flew over the ice sheet to place each of them behind the glacier front.

Mark Fahnestock and his colleague load reflectors into the helicopter.

After all ten had been scattered in their designated spots on the ice, we made a quick stop in the helo to check in with Mark’s Swiss colleague Martin Lüthi. Martin was programming the Leica theodolite to keep track of the reflectors’ changing positions and calculate the speed of Jakobshavn glacier.

Martin Lüthi and his Swiss-made theodolite for tracking the glacier’s speed.

The day’s missions appeared to be accomplished, so Mark could relax and chat a bit before the helicopter took Lisa and I back to Ilulissat. We hope to catch up with him after he comes out of the field and find out what he’s learned this season about how the glacier is changing.

By the way, we didn’t see a calving event so we’ll have to rely on Mark’s video which we hope to post soon with his interview.

But here’s the thing: Greenland really is green if one comes here at the right time to the right places. The Norse arrived during a particularly warm and green period in human history, an era called the Medieval Climate Optimum between the 8th and 13th centuries. The weather got less cooperative for farming and livestock rearing later during what’s known as the Little Ice Age (from the 16th to the early 19th century) and the Viking settlements in West and East Greenland died out. With recent warming, Greenland may be returning to the days of the early Norse settlers and I’ve read that farmers are growing broccoli in South Greenland. (We’re farther north and I didn’t see any food cultivation, except in window sills and greenhouses.)

A green Greenland.

We came to Kangerlussuaq at the height of summer, our own climate optimum, and found places out of town chockablock with green plants and life bursting at the seams. On the coastal margins, where most of Greenland’s terrestrial ecosystems and all its human communities outside of science camps exist, this Arctic habitat can be dense if not especially diverse. Plants and animals have adapted to their environment in robust ways, including mosquitoes that to our dismay can fly at temperatures approaching freezing, and Arctic Foxes and Hares that are perfectly happy in –40 degree C weather.

But things are changing here and it may become more difficult for Arctic species to adapt and survive. One consequence of climate change is that spring is arriving earlier now than in the past, a trend that can adversely affect iconic Arctic animals such as caribou. We learned about global warming and Arctic ecosystems during a nature hike outside Kanger with Henning Thing, a biologist from Denmark. In the 1970s, Henning came to Greenland to study caribou and more recently as an IPY research facilitator for the Danish Agency for Science, Technology, and Innovation.

Henning Thing.

On our hike, Henning pointed out a tiny, perfectly formed orchid that I did my best to photograph. We also came across a patch of crowberries, a tart black berry used here to flavor beer and delicious to eat straight from the bush (which we did). Henning said the berries were early and especially dense this year, along with other plants that have been budding and flowering two weeks earlier than they have during the past 14 years, when he first started coming to Greenland.

My attempt to photograph the orchid.

The result: a Greenland orchid.

Plants respond to warming temperatures by producing shoots, flowers and fruit earlier in the season. Animals, however, are typically cued by day length rather than temperature so increasingly plant and animal communities are getting out of step with each other. For female caribou, this can become a problem because the timing of their pregnancies and births has evolved to coincide with the first new leaves of spring. If they give birth after the first and most nutritious leaves have come and gone, the mother caribou might not receive enough calories and nutrients to produce rich milk for their calves.

This is just one of the consequences of global warming being actively investigated by biologists, glaciologists, and climate scientists here in Greenland.

The abundant, early crowberries.

We traveled by helicopter from Ilulissat to five different sites along the ice sheet edge to collect rocks that came from under the ice sheet. (Once I got the hang of it I collected a few as well, doing my part for science.) In total, the team collected 300 rocks for their research project, about 650 pounds worth.

They’ll ship the rocks back to their lab at the University of Vermont, grind them up to separate the quartz, and send the extracted crystals for analysis at the Lawrence Livermore National Labs. If all goes well, the analysis will reveal the last time the rocks were exposed to cosmic rays from the sun, which would be the last time that the ice sheet was missing from that region of Greenland. (Video by Lisa Strong-Aufhauser.)

From the helicopter, the Greenland Ice Sheet is fractured with streams, lakes and waterways from summer-time surface melting.

We were happy to see the helo return to keep us busy with these interviews of Sarah Das and Ian Joughin, the lead scientists for the lake studies.

Check the Greenland Crew page for my video dispatch about being on our own with a dynamic glacier under foot.