Cargo Chaos!

Although the 2013 Field Seminar doesn’t start for another month (and the Kangerlussuaq early season crew doesn’t head out for another two weeks), packing and preparation have been in full swing these past few days.  While fancy graduation receptions took place all across campus, we gathered cargo and food in the Arctic Library, packed it all into boxes, coolers, and crates, and entered each piece into the Polar Services online cargo tracking system.

Food planning for the field is a lot of fun.  At the supermarket, we filled two enormous carts past overflowing.  At checkout, our cashier told us it was the largest single purchase she had ever seen!  To ensure breakfast enjoyment, I baked two enormous batches of granola. 

Once all of the food was in the Arctic Library, chaotic food organization ensued.  Hopefully we won’t go hungry…

After food planning, we moved on to packing science cargo.  All of our field gear has to be packed up safely so it is intact when we arrive in Kangerlussuaq.  Each package must be weighed, measured, and entered into the cargo tracking system with a description of its contents and value.  With 28 separate packages, this is no small task!  Each package gets its own manifest slipped inside and its own label taped on the outside.  After almost an entire roll of duct tape, those labels aren’t going anywhere!

Yesterday, Zach and I loaded everything into a huge cargo van (including two bubble-wrapped modular kayaks) and headed over to Scotia, NY. 

We handed off the cargo to our friends at the 109^th Airlift Wing; we are ever thankful for all the work they do to make our field seasons successful.  The next time we see them will be June 25^th, when we board the plane to Greenland!

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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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Thule margin work

Erich Osterberg and I spent the past week along the ice margin in Thule, Greenland, working with a variety of methods: lake coring, cosmogenic nuclide dating of glacial erratic boulders, and radiocarbon dating of fossil vegetation. This work will ultimately become part of my thesis, and was a great way to investigate the Thule area from a variety of angles. Our goal is to study the Holocene (the most recent ~10,000 years) climate history of Thule, and in particular a period of warm climate ~6,000 years ago (called the Holocene Climatic Optimum).

We collected sediment cores from two lakes near Thule. We can investigate various parameters within the lake sediment (for example, the amount of organic material, the size of the sediment, etc) and make inferences about climate of the past. We took cores from two very different lakes in close proximity. The first lake was fed by a large inflow, and therefore has likely experienced a high sedimentation rate throughout the Holocene; accordingly, our 1-m length corer wasn’t sufficient to reach the beginning of the sediment record. The second lake did not have an inflow, and therefore has likely experienced a low sedimentation rate. The cores we collected from this lake were very short, suggesting that the entire Holocene history of the lake is preserved in only a few tens of cm of sediment. We brought home four cores in all, and will analyze and interpret them over the coming year.

Our faithful boat, “Cookie Monster”, sitting in front of the first lake we cored.

To get an idea of the timing of ice margin retreat, we collected samples for cosmogenic nuclide dating in many areas across the landscape near Thule. When an ice sheet retreats (like at the end of the last ice age), it drops large boulders on the landscape. As these boulders are uncovered, they become exposed to the sky and are bombarded by high-energy cosmic radiation from outside our solar system; this high energy radiation causes the formation of beryllium-10, a rare isotope that is not formed through other mechanisms on Earth’s surface. If we know the rate at which beryllium-10 is produced in rocks (only about 5 atoms per gram of quartz per year), and we can quantify the present-day abundance of beryllium-10, we can calculate the time since exposure (i.e. the time that the ice margin last retreated from this area). During our last week in Greenland, we sampled the tops of ~25 large boulders, spread across the land surface. We’ll use this data to determine the timing, and maybe even the rate, of ice sheet retreat at the end of the last ice age.

Erich samples the top of a large boulder for beryllium-10 analysis.

Finally, our third mission was to collect samples for radiocarbon dating, which allows us to determine the age of fossilized organic material. At several points during the Holocene, the climate warmed and the ice margin probably retreated upward from its present-day position. A receded ice sheet would have allowed vegetation to colonize the previously-covered areas. When climate cooled again, the ice margin would have re-advanced and covered the vegetated surface. We explored several areas of the ice sheet margin near Thule, and found fossilized organic material preserved in two locations. In some cases, this material was melting directly out of the ice. We’re guessing that this material may date to the Holocene Climatic Optimum or the Medieval Warm Period, and hopefully we’ll know by this fall or winter.

Fossilized vegetation exposed from beneath the ice sheet margin.

All in all, we had a very successful week of work along the Thule margin. We also took some time for fun. On my birthday (July 17th), Erich took me to “D-Launch”, an abandoned missile launch silo on Thule Air Base. Most of the infrastructure is underground, in the permafrost zone, and so all of the rooms are filled halfway with ice. We had to climb down ladders with headlamps to get in, and totally creeped ourselves out while we poked around.

The view from D-Launch epitomizes Thule: beautiful, pristine Greenland coast with the unmistakable footprint of human warfare.

Alas, my 2011 field season has sadly come to an end. Thanks for following the progress of the Dartmouth Thule crew! We’ll continue to post updates as we get data.

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