Thule field season complete

The Thule field team is now home, and happy to report that we had a very successful field season. After some initial windy weather, the low-pressure system finally left the Arctic and gave us a week and a half of clear skies and bright sun. We managed to accomplish a huge amount of work. Highlights include collecting a shallow ice core from North Ice Cap, collecting 20 samples from bedrock and boulders for beryllium-10 dating, collecting lake sediment cores from several different lakes, and finding fossil plant material melting out from the ice cap margin.

Team Thule collects a shallow lake core from “Delta So”, a lake near the margin of North Ice Cap. From left to right: John Thompson, Ellen Roy, Meredith Kelly, and Matt Bigl.

Although there are many components of our project, we hope to use a variety of different methods together to understand how North Ice Cap has behaved over the Holocene (the past ~11,000 years). In particular, we’re interested in how the extent of the ice cap has changed over time. Did it grow during cold periods and shrink during warm periods? Has it been bigger in the past than it is now? If so, how much bigger? And maybe more fundamentally, how old is the ice cap? We’ll continue to explore these questions over the coming year as we analyze the samples and data collected during this field season.

Team Thule admires a long lake sediment core extracted from “Delta So”. We hope this core will tell us about how the ice cap margin has behaved during the past. From background to foreground: Matt Bigl, Meredith Kelly, and Erich Osterberg.

Although we worked hard in the field, we also had the opportunity to admire our surroundings and appreciate how fortunate we are to work in this area. The last lake we camped at was particularly beautiful; this ice-marginal lake had a large calving margin, and we were routinely entertained by calving events which sent small tidal waves and ice bergs by our tents.

Our last camp, right at the margin of North Ice Cap. Watch out for ice bergs!

Overall, we had a very successful field season and I’m excited to be back at Dartmouth to analyze samples and interpret data. Thank you to my field team (Professors Meredith Kelly and Erich Osterberg, post-doctoral fellow Eric Lutz, MS student Matt Bigl, and undergraduate students Ellen Roy and John Thompson) for all their hard work, and to the field planning and logistics gurus at CPS (especially Kim Derry and Joe Hurley) for making everything happen. Stay tuned for some exciting results over the coming year!

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Back to Thule!

I just wanted to provide a quick update that I’ve arrived in Thule, northwestern Greenland, and am about to deploy to a remote field site for two and a half weeks to conduct research that will ultimately become part of my dissertation. I was very sad to leave the rest of my IGERT team as they headed to Nuuk, but am excited to be beginning the next chapter of my work in Greenland. I’m also happy to return to Thule, where I spent a month last summer.

This season I’m looking forwards to working with Dartmouth College Earth Sciences faculty Meredith Kelly and Erich Osterberg, post doctoral fellow Eric Lutz, graduate student Matt Bigl, and undergraduate students Ellen Roy and John Thompson. We’ll be working from several different remote field camps north of Thule, and employing a variety of approaches including collecting ice cores, lake sediment cores, samples from glacially-deposited boulders for beryllium-10 dating, and samples of fossilized organic material for carbon-14 dating. Our goals are to study how temperature has varied over the Holocene (the past ~11,000 years), and to investigate how temperature changes impacted the size of both the Greenland Ice Sheet and a smaller body of ice called North Ice Cap.

Alas, I will have no internet access while in the field. However, I’ll provide updates upon our return. Please check back the end of the month!

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Sunscreen – The Secret to Surviving on an Ice Sheet

[as seen in Dartmouth's The Graduate Forum (newsletter)]

As graduate students, we all share this singular pursuit, this unabashed chase of scholastic glory. We all enjoy the burden of late nights glazed with copious amounts of caffeine and buoyed by an endless sea of scientific papers. We all enjoy the bucolic wonders of Hanover and the Upper Valley, the unrelenting, yet rewarding, joys of being a graduate student at Dartmouth College. If you’re reading this, I imagine you are, like me, toiling away at some novel and intractable question while balancing the rest of your life. Not easy, but we’re all getting by. So what happens when, in the midst of this sometimes-stultifying stupor, you find yourself on the front-end of a 40-day traverse of the Greenland Ice Sheet?

Buy sunscreen!

[Getting ready for a day of snowmobiling! From left: Thomas Overly (IGERT), CH2MHill-supplied mountaineer and all-around awesome guy Galen Dossin, and Gifford Wong (IGERT)]

That is what I did when I found myself days away from joining the 2011 Greenland Inland Traverse (GrIT). GrIT, conceived primarily as an overland supply-run for the year-round science station at Summit Camp located on top of the ice sheet, recently became open to the idea of supporting science. The first leg of the journey is a flight from Baltimore, Maryland, to Thule Air Base on the northwest coast of Greenland. Thule Air Base is the US Armed Forces’ northernmost installation, located 750 miles north of the Arctic Circle, and serves as the home base and garage for GrIT, a joint operation involving the National Science Foundation (NSF), the US Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL) and CH2M Hill Polar Services.

Professor Robert Hawley, in the Department of Earth Sciences, originally proposed the idea of pairing science with this traverse. He passed this tremendous field opportunity to two of his current graduate students – Thomas Overly and Gifford Wong (yours truly). Some of the fantastic reasons, science-wise, why this traverse was so tremendous were it provided a comfortable (relatively) platform from which to perform ground truthing studies, it was an opportunity to revisit science sites along a route that was first studied in the 1950s by Carl Benson, a CRREL-based researcher, and it lead to a wealth of data for his lab group to sift through for the next couple years.

[Sun setting behind one of our Case Quad-tracks.]

But that’s not all. Nearly everyone enjoys fantastic, and sometimes far-flung, field adventures. For me, the thing that made this past field season so special was the traverse itself. It is the journey that is interesting. I’ve been fortunate to participate in polar science before (McMurdo Station [see pg.3], West Antarctica, Summit Station, and Byrd Surface Camp [see "Views of a Deep Field Virgin", pg.11]), but I’ve never had to drive there. I’ve never had to submit myself to 1400 miles worth of ice sheet whimsy. I’ve never had so much of my livelihood rely on what continually seemed like never-long-enough days. And, I’ve never had the fortune to be surrounded by so much serenity. Perhaps my favorite moments, outside of the general tomfoolery that emerges when 6 young-at-heart individuals combine for 40 days of toil and effort, were those spent with my own thoughts as we bounded across the endless ice sheet like a small convoy of ships crossing an endless sea, buoyed by thousands of years worth of snow and ice all waiting to tell their stories.

[The traverse train trundling along in front of some mountains at GPS waypoing "B11A".]

This story starts out, however, as a pseudo-survival guide for any would-be ice sheet traveler. If you’re contemplating such a trip, I imagine most of the obvious concerns have already been addressed, such as packing a lot of high-calorie food or outfitting yourself with plenty of puffy and warm clothing. Like this summer’s list of things to do in Hanover, I present, in no particular order, my top 5 things to think about when traversing an ice sheet:

1) Be prepared to be cold. Not surprising, but it bears repeating.

2) Be patient. This goes along with the cold component, but hardly anything happens quickly when you’re waddling around in 8 layers of clothing. Seriously.

3) Try not to sweat. This pairs well with that patience thing, for if you do sweat you’ll definitely feel the cold.

4) Eat. You’re essentially stoking your internal, caloric heater with food, so eat often. Besides, when else can you indulge in over 4000 calories a day and lose weight?!

5) If there’s a plane, get on it. As much as I love the ice sheet, there truly is no place like home. I spent an extra 7 days in Greenland because I did not get on a plane. Silly.

And sunscreen? That ranks right up there with oxygen and a -40 sleeping bag!

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