Current assessments of the past and present climate and predictions of future climate change are based on observations spanning several decades, centuries and millennium, from instrument records, ice cores, tree rings, lake and ocean sediment cores, and geologic records from all over the globe. No one single weather event or season or year is enough evidence to point either way. But having said that, I have at last seen something I never thought I would see in the middle of an ice sheet.

Temperatures have been so warm up at camp that it is actually possible to make snowballs. Usually the snow is too dry and cold to come even close to having something you can satisfactorily pelt at someone, and if you do want to throw something at someone, you have to get down to where the snow has compacted a bit and throw a big snow chunk. The stuff on the surface is usually fluffy or wind-packed and hard and dry. No snowballs. But up at NEEM the temperature got close to and above freezing for a bit, which is unheard of. It makes working and drilling out on the surface difficult…the snow tends to melt and refreeze when you don’t want it to. But it also meant we could have a snowball fight, and Aksel, the ace electrician up at camp from Denmark, started in immediately with building a rather ambitious snow man…

Askel and Adrian start out big with the bottom snowball of a snow ball.

…which turned into a snow penguin after the base snowball for the man proved to be just a little too big. (Sverrir, the Icelandic mechanic in camp, helped Aksel by pushing a load of snow using the machine used to groom the skiway).

Zoe and Kaitlin with the snow penguin.

Ice core just coming out of drill.

All of this work is completed in an 8 m (26 ft) deep trench that was painstakingly dug out last year (but with snow blowers…at least not with shovels!). This trench has been covered with a wooden roof (complete with sky lights), and makes for a fairly comfortable, albeit cold for the sake of the ice cores, working environment.

Kaitlin in the science trench.

Descending the steep stairway from the surface into the system of trenches (one trench is for the drilling operation and one is for the science operation) is otherworldly. It really looks like a civilization of trolls has dug themselves a snow palace. Think Lord of the Rings meets North Pole. Connecting the drill trench and the science trench is a wide passageway through the snow, on the other end of which is a marvel of a laboratory. Several stations are set up where different measurements are being made—each station is manned by some of the best and the brightest graduate students around. Unlike most US drilling programs, for this program, a lot of the ice core measurements are being done on site. This eliminates the risk of something happening to the precious cores before the measurements can be made and helps reduce contamination from handling the core. Basically this hole in the snow in the middle of nowhere has been turned into one of the most advanced ice core laboratories in the world.

The well-tuned processing line. We’re jammn,’ mon.

The trenches are cold, yes, but the group working keeps up morale by listening to music (lots of Bob Marley and Jack Johnson…fairly tropical selections) and taking frequent, mandatory tea and coffee breaks. There are too many nationalities (German, French, Japanese, Greek, Danish, Australian, American) in the trench to keep track of, and everyone pitches in to help everyone out, so that no one falls behind and the work continues seamlessly.

The Stations

Atsushi works the Swiss Saw, which cuts the top of the core off to leave a flat surface for measurements.

The Swiss Saw is run by Atsushi from the Low Temperature Institute in Hokkaido, Japan, who happens to be a whiz at the thing, very fast and precise. He is hard to keep up with. The Swiss saw cuts the top of the ice core off, as it is lying down horizontally. This allows for several of the next measurements to be made, as it leaves a nice flat surface to work on.

The line scan. Bubbles in the ice are visible as the line scanner moves over the core.

Vasileois carefully preparing the ice core for the line scan.

The line scan is run by Vasileios from Denmark. The line scanner is a video camera set on a track that records an image of the cores after Vas, and his helper Kaitlin (Kaitlin agreed to help out for a bit in the science trench after we had most of our work done), have carefully shaved the top of the ice core so that it becomes perfectly clear. The line scan records the visual stratigraphy, or layering, in the ice core. The ice core is photographed against a dark background using indirect light, which allows for clear and cloudy bands in the ice to be imaged. The cloudy bands contain more impurities, especially dust, than the clear bands of ice, and show up white while the clear bands show up as black against the background. The bands are indications of seasonal cycles, with dustier ice with higher impurities originating in summer months.

Lars sets up a core in the DEP.

The DEP (Dielectric Profile) is run by Lars from the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, Germany. The DEP is essentially two curved electrodes that are scraped down the top of the ice core (the cut that Atusushi made!) and record the conductivity and the permittivity of the ice which are sensitive to the acidity and the amount of sea salt in the ice. These, in turn, vary with the seasons, and so the DEP can be used to date the ice on a very fine scale.

Aslak runs the ECM.

The ECM (Electrical Conductivity Measurements) is run by Aslak, also from Denmark. The ECM consists of two electrodes, much like the DEP, which are drug down the ice core and record the electrical conductivity of the ice core. The electrical conductivity is sensitive, among other things, to peaks in acidity in the ice core due to volcanic eruptions. Where the electrodes record a peak in conductance is a layer where volcanic material has been deposited. Knowing when the volcano erupted helps then with dating the ice core. Together using the line scan, the DEP and the ECM together is a really powerful way of ensuring that the dating is done in the most accurate way possible…basically there are three independent measures of the annual and sub-annual layers in the ice.

Celebrating 500 m of cores processed in the CFA lab

The CFA (Continuous Flow Analysis) is run by 6 researchers in two shifts, and is really an amazing set up. The CFA essentially melts one section of the core (a “stick” or a rectangular section that has been cut out of the middle of the core by yet another army of science trenchers who man the saws), sucks the flow from the center of the melting ice, discards the waste water from the edges, and feeds the center flow to a series of analyzers which measure the melted ice core water for different chemicals. The concentration of people, instruments, and computers in the DFA lab is enough to produce a lot of heat, so the CFA has been housed in it’s own little insulated space to keep the rest of the science trench cold. The CFA lab reaches temperature of 30 deg C (around 85 deg F)! It’s a funny scene in there, with the 3 researchers in t-shirts while everyone else is bundled up in the science trench.

Physical Properties. Back in her own little room off of the science trench, Daphne of the LGGE in Grenoble, France, measures the size and the orientation of the crystals in the ice.

In addition to the different science stations, a bevy of other researchers works to cut and package the cores. When everyone is down there working together, it resembles an ice core ballet (just well-insulated and heavily clothed)! It really is amazing to watch.

Anaïs prepares sections of core to be shipped to various labs all over the world.

In Kanger, Kaitlin got an excellent introduction to Greenland—we caught a ride with the NEEM camp manager up to the edge of the ice sheet. The area we went to was Russell Glacier, one of my favorite spots. There, a 40 foot wall of ice calves off into the Watson River below. Volkswagen-sized ice chunks churn in the silty water and are carried down the river. Since it is July, the glacier is calving all the time, and the river is flowing fast.

Vas Petrenko hikes near Russell Glacier.

Tunnel of ice near Russell Glacier.

On the way back into town from the glacier, we saw two musk oxen close to the road. The flowers are in bloom, and Greenland really is green for a bit. It’s a great introduction to Greenland for Kaitlin’s first day.

Musk ox near ice edge.

It seems we will now be delayed in Kanger for a bit before we can fly up to camp…not due to storms, but due to the temperatures being too warm! When the snow gets warm enough (it’s -5 deg C or 23 deg F up at camp…really, really warm for polar work) the Hercules aircraft (ski-equipped LC-130’s) we fly in have a hard time getting enough speed to take off on the skiway, or snow runway, up at camp. Sometimes, this means the pilots have to use JATO (Jet Assisted Take-Off), which is basically rockets attached to the side of the plane which are fired to give the plane extra lift. We’ll see if that’s what it takes for the plane to take off at NEEM!

Greenland is green! Flowers near Lake Ferguson in Kangerlussuaq.

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

A Herc on snow.

But back at Summit Camp; I wanted to videotape a take off, but low on sleep, at 11,000’ in elevation, and with a resting heart rate of 97, I decided I would not try to drag myself outside. Instead, I shot through the window of The Big House, the central hub of activity at Summit Camp. Next day, though, I felt much better and asked to shoot our plane landing on skis. Chris Greenfield, the Summit Camp medic, was much obliged. He packed me and my camera and tripod on the back of a snowmobile and roared out to what we hoped would be close to where the Herc would set down.

Lisa and Chris on a snowmobile.

I had never been on a snow machine before. It was exhilarating to fly across the snow like that. We stopped. I jumped off, set up my tripod and camera, then the Herc landed much further away than we had hoped. Not much of a shot. But then Chris asked if I wanted to ride along side the Herc as it skied in. Sure! I piled back on. It was almost impossible at 45 mph to shoot straight. I was barely hanging on. At one point, my headphones and sunglasses started slipping down my head. One hand on the camera, one hand on the grip handle at my hip, I had to ease them back on with a shrug and a little help from Chris’s back. Again, it wasn’t such a great shot, but the experience was unforgettable. Still, you’ll find a bit of it in this video of the Herc in the snow at Summit Camp.

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.)