Pilot Andrew Wojcicki with the monitor he or the copilot uses to follow the grid lines while flying.

We saw one of the grid maps. The flight crew must have been spinning aerial half brodies at the end of each line to stay flat and achieve their results.

One of the grid maps.

Mary was pretty excited, specifically, about the Kenn Borek Twin Otter as they also serve the US Antarctic Program. She saw a number of the distinctively painted planes during her 2001 Antarctic trip. Find out why the Twin Otter is such a good platform for research as Mary talks to the pilot, Andrew Wojcicki.

Mary and I have flown with three different helicopter pilots – Morton Hauerbach, Ønstein Holmen, and Peter Haj. All lifted off and landed in some austere, beautiful and remote locations, often under challenging conditions of wind or the absence of flat space to set down. We flew to Mark Fahnestock’s camp which was perched on a rock ridge above the calving face of the Jakobshavn Glacier with Morton. The door was off the helicopter so Mark could load the reflectors and place them onto the glacier while the helicopter hovered just above the ice. The open door caught the wind off the glacier like a sail when we landed. I imagine it must have been an instance of precision flying to set the reflectors out safely and successfully, which they did.

Shooting an iceberg out of the helicopter.

Ønstein took us to Sarah Das’s camp out on the Greenland ice sheet where they were studying a surface lake, which had drained before them two days before we got there. The science team hired the helicopter for an aerial survey of the surrounding area to find more ice-top lakes. The perspective from the helicopter is deceptive when flying over the vast white plain with no visual landmarks. While we found the drained lake with GPS technology, we flew around a few times before recognizing those tiny dots below where, in fact, tents and people waiting for us.

Peter flew Tom Neumann’s geology team along the ice edge looking for rocks for a day. We tagged along. Tom and his group peered out the windows looking at places where they might find rocks entrained in the ice. They never considered where we might land! Peter once set us down on a spot so small the ground fell away at the exact spot that the skids curved up. We landed in a spot so windy, Peter had to tie the rotor down while we were on the ground. Another time, Mary and I had to duck behind a rock and cover the video equipment with our bodies as the helicopter landed feet away, then jump in while the rotors were still spinning.

Here is a video montage of some of our helicopter time.

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.)

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.

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.