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.

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.

Lisa and I were lucky enough to catch a helicopter ride up to visit the lake camp and catch some interviews while the event was still fresh in everyone’s mind. On the way out and back, we saw a complex network of the streams, ponds, ice cracks, and lakes that develop on the Greenland Ice Sheet every summer.

In these first videos, I interview Kristin Poinar, a graduate student at the University of Washington, and Chris Linder, a photographer from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who describe what they saw, heard and felt when the lake was draining. During our interview with Chris, we hear what sounds like a rifle shot, remnants of ice cracking he was in the process of describing.

Stay tuned for interviews with the lead glaciologists on the project, who describe what it’s like for a scientist to actually experience an event previously only observed through remote satellite imaging and instruments.

Update July 17th, 2008: Lisa and I caught up with Tom Neumann and Paul Bierman in Illulissat and will be going out in the field with them today to survey some new sampling sites for their glacier study. Check back for more soon.

Essentially they are small round pools of water on the top of a glacier that have a layer of dirt on the bottom. But here’s the amazing thing about cryoconites: they harbor a complete ecosystem with single-celled photosynthetic bacteria and algae that are eaten by tiny nematodes, rotifers, and tardigrades (“water bears”) that are, in turn, eaten by carnivorous tardigrades.

A cryoconite we found atop the Jacobshavn glacier.

I knew that about Antarctic cryoconites, but I wasn’t sure about the Arctic variety so we searched out a bookstore in Ilulissat today and I looked it up in the “Ecology of Greenland.” Sure enough, this textbook, published in 2001 in English, Danish and Greenlandic, answered my question: the little melt-holes on ice contain six species of tardigrades. The most common, Diphascon recameri, can be found in abundance; one study counted 367 water bears in a 10 ml sample found on the Jakobshavn glacier. Tardigrades have even been found 80 meters below the surface happily making a living in cryoconite dust that washes down deep ice crevices.

A typical species of tartigrades.

The cryoconites themselves start when a bit of wind-blown dust containing these hardy organisms lands on the ice. The dark color of the dust absorbs more of the sun’s energy than white ice and melts a hole in the ice sheet. The holes can reach a depth of 20 cm and we saw hundreds of these little aquaria everywhere we walked on the ice. On a summer day, even though the surrounding ice is below freezing, the temperature of the dust at the bottom of a cryoconite can reach 6 degrees C, a cozy environment for its inhabitants.

Multiple cryoconites on the Jacobshavn glacier.

Isn’t life amazing that it can even eke it out on top of an ice sheet?

This picture, taken from a helicopter, depicts deep ice cracks and melting streams atop a Greenland glacier.

In ‘Greenland’s Glacier Lakes, Part 1,’ we introduced you to Ian Joughin, who has been studying these flood events using seismometers and GPS devices in the lakes to understand how they might be related to glacier speed and whether they impact the Greenland Ice Sheet as a whole.

In this video, we ask Ian about the significance of these floods in an interview we recorded with him as he was traveling up to his research camp. Check back soon to learn more about our trip to Sarah Das and Ian’s research site atop the Jakobshavn Glacier.

A false-color (near-infrared, green, blue) view of Ilulissat and the glacier, acquired by NASA’s Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer’s nadir camera.

The Jakobshavn (pronounced ya-cub-shaw-ven) is an outlet glacier, a swift-moving stream of ice that drains from the Greenland Ice Sheet into the sea. Scientists have been tracking the speed of this glacier and were startled to discover that it has doubled in the last decade. The question is why and what significance this has to the Greenland Ice Sheet as a whole.

There are lots of science groups now studying this racing glacier and we’re here in Ilulissat to catch up with them and hear first-hand about their research. I plan to ask them whether we should be worried that the Greenland Ice Sheet is losing mass and raising sea level faster than predicated. So today, we’re traveling by helicopter to the top of the Jakobshavn glacier to a science group led by Sarah Das from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Ian Joughin from the University of Washington. We caught up with these scientists on our trip north and grabbed an interview with Ian in Kangerlussauq before he left for his research camp. Here’s an excerpt from that interview.