The coldest month
GREENLAND 2011
INTRODUCTION
March 2011
Discover the expedition
GREENLAND 2011
Copenhagen, Denmark
It seems that the biggest adventures of my life always started in a big city. I had just turned 23, and was keen to get more experience under my belt. After spending some weeks at home and in Svalbard that year, I was ready for more time in high latitude environment. I was reuniting with Sam Doyle, my teammate in the Himalayas, and then Dr. Alun Hubbard, my MSc coordinator at the university of Aberystwyth. And with that, two new colleagues from Sweden, Prof. Rickard Pettersson and his PhD students Katrin Lindback. Together we are aiming to spend 3 or 4 weeks on the ice sheet, on a glacier called Russel Glacier Catchment above 1000 m in altitude. Air Greenland took us to Kangerlussuaq on the west coast of the island, a real Arctic hub at the head of a "big fjord" of the same name.
We spent a few days there sorting out food, equipment, preparing our solar panels and research tools. I took over the little workshop at KISS, Kangerlussaq International Science Support, drilling, cutting, soldering, and cutting my hand in several places in trying to be quick. Sam was giving me lists of things to do every day, including my favorite mission "go for walk" ;)
TO THE ICE
The flight was incredible. The ice sheet looked a lot more heterogeneous than I had imagined. There were giant crevasse fields, hills, troughs, the first ice sheet I ever saw and worked on.
"Welcome to hell" said Sam as soon as we landed. And indeed, it was. At least during the first week. We started our expedition in the middle of a cold anomaly. While other polar institutes were getting their researchers off the ice, we were getting our little camp set up. For the first few days, we had to dig, dig dig dig. I always say that glaciologists are first and foremost Dr. in digging, and this was no exception. We were coming back to a site that Alun Hubbard and his team had been using for a few years, in the accumulation zone of the ice sheet. Accumulation means snowfall, and indeed the boxes, tents, overcraft for the previous years were buried deep in snow. This was the perfect strategy to keep us warm so we never complained about digging! We were particularly happy when we found the alcohol stock and the snacks.
In the little tent I was sharing with Katrin, we had placed a mini thermometer. When I was lying in my sleeping bag I had my eyes glued to the thermometer, crossing the -35°c threshold, then -40°c and eventually -44°c. This was inside the tent! When I said I was not prepared, it was mostly because my equipment could survive a balmy -20°c at the lowest, not -44°c. We all struggled so much with these temperatures. Our equipment was breaking, our bodies were suffering, every day was a battle against the cold.
And in the middle of this cold wave, we had to do some science! Our expedition was a part of the Greenland Analogue Project, our mission was to focus on the hydrology of the ice sheet. For this, 4 main goals:
- servicing existing weather stations
- installing GPS
- burying seismometers
- do a lot of radar and hope to detect some subglacial lakes