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.

We are getting up to camp in the middle of a very successful season, so far, for the deep drilling campaign being lead by Danish researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. The project I am working on is a side project, really. We’ll be working 2 km (1.2 miles) away from the main drilling camp on a “shallow” drilling project. Shallow in this case is to the transition from snow to ice, which we expect to happen around 80 m (260 ft) here. At this depth, the weight of the snow layers above is enough to compress the snow, which is open to air flow with large spaces between snow particles, into ice, in which air pockets become isolated from one another. As we drill, several groups will be sampling the air in the borehole at different depths. My main job in this group is to log the core that we are drilling, which will later be shipped back to the lab for measurements of permeability (how easily air can be pumped through the snow) and grain size. Luckily, I won’t be making these measurements! Kaitlin Keegan, a new PhD student at Dartmouth College, will. She’s up with me at NEEM to get a first-hand view of how this all works. My other main job is to dig and sample a 2 m (6.5 ft) deep snow pit. Pits are dug in the top 2 m because usually cores from the surface are too fragile to make it back to the lab intact. Below that though, the cores are usually surprising robust…a bit like Styrofoam.

NEEM is a mini, frozen United Nations on the ice cap. Flags are flown for every country represented at camp, and they are many. One of the first orders of business is to fly the Greek flag, in honor of Vasileois Gnikos, a Greek native working in Denmark on his PhD thesis who arrived on the same plane that I did.

Askel and Vasileois arrange the flags to make room for the Greek flag.

Askel and Vasileois raise the Greek flag.

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.

The C-130 Hercules aircraft.

A JATO (jet assisted take-off) rocket in Kanger. The JATO rockets are used to help the C-130 Herc’s get off the ground.

The flight was five and a half hours long, which is actually fairly quick, and we were able to get to Kanger in plenty of time to sort cargo and eat dinner at the airport cafeteria: meatball soup and some sort of meat in some sort of loaf. Greenland is not an easy place for a vegetarian, which poor Elyse happens to be. She will be well fed once we get up to Summit Camp, as there are two excellent cooks who make us all lunch and dinner, always with a vegetarian option.

Elyse in front of our Kanger lodging.

We stayed in the Musk Ox Inn, which is new for me. In the past, I have always stayed at the KISS (Kangerlussuaq International Science Support) building, but on this trip there are so many science groups up in Greenland that there was no room for our group heading up to Summit.

Downtown Kanger.

The two buildings are nearly the same though– both remnants of the old US airbase that the town used to be. My hotel room did have a nice view of the fjord.

The fjord.

In Kanger, we were also happy to meet up with the fifth person on our team, Maria Horhold from the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany. Maria and I have worked together on other snow projects in the past, and I’m super excited to get to see her again. Maria is a PhD student well into her thesis work. Last summer, she spent several weeks in Greenland traversing to the new Danish deep drilling site, NEEM (North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling.) It’s always fun to talk snow with her.

Tom will, sadly, only be up at Summit Camp for one week doing radar profiles of different sites we’ve visited around Summit in the last few years. The radar will help us determine what the snow is like in different places around camp.

Tom in the back of the pick-up truck at the airport. The trucks are the transport to and from the airport into town.

This is the second trip up for Elyse, who will be a junior this year at Hamiliton. She is a great help with field work, always in a good mood and willing to work. Even when work means staying up until 2am to finish a drilling project.

Kristina will be a senior at Bowdoin college, up here at Summit for the first time. She is very enthusiastic about the trip, and we are going to do all that we can to convince her that studying snow is the thing to do.

Kristina (left) and Elyse (right) at the airport in NY.

Kanger is one of my favorite places, as it reminds me of my home town when I was young: dirt streets, friendly waves from folks driving by, small town. And of course, best of all, it is the gateway to Summit Camp, which I’m very much looking forward to seeing again.

Typical Kanger transportation.