Word: air
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...finest piste in the world, carve 200-year-old ice cores in a polar cave that would make Superman swoon, and relax at night (night being relative, since the sun never sets during the Arctic summer) with copious amounts of Carlsberg beer delivered to you by the U.S. Air Force? They didn't tell us it would be like this back in high school biology class...
Getting out to the NEEM project site - on the northwest slice of the Greenland ice cap, some hundreds of kilometers from anything - was less fun. Our ride was a Hercules C-130 cargo plane, which also delivered provisions to the camp, as air travel is about the only way to get on and off the ice cap. It was scheduled to depart Kangerlussuaq at about 6 a.m., which required our group to be out of the hotel by 4:30 in the morning. Getting up at 3:45 a.m., I experienced something entirely new after seven years of international reporting...
...what they bring back is not solid ice, but a half-snow, half-ice substance called firn. It's solid but porous, so it can trap some of the gas present in the atmosphere when it accumulated as snow. They can tell how much carbon dioxide was in the air during a given time period (roughly seven years with each layer, because in the porous firn - unlike the frozen ice below - air from different years can mix over time), and by analyzing oxygen isotopes inside the firn, they can tell the temperature as well. Johnsen and Hansen bring a core...
...drill down to the bottom, you can read the climatic history of the island as if you were counting tree rings going back tens of thousands of years. Oxygen isotopes trapped in the ice core can tell you what the temperature was in a given year; trapped air bubbles can reveal how much carbon dioxide and other gases were in the atmosphere at a particular time. You can even trace impurities that were in the air during the Roman Empire to a specific lead mine in Spain, according to J.P. Steffensen, one of NEEM's field leaders...
...anything but Arctic. In the heat of the sun, temperatures exceed 70?F, and I shed layers of fleece as I take a jet-lagged walk around town. Not that there's anything to see: Kangerlussuaq didn't really exist until the Americans began using it as an air base in World War II, and though it reverted to Greenland control in 1992, it still feels like an abandoned military camp...