Word: greenlands
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...core science is incredibly important, because it can help us understand how climate changed in the past - and how it might change in the future. It's also, as the participants in the North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling (NEEM) project will tell you, incredibly fun. Where else can you snowmobile all day across some of the 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...
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...
...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...
...Kangerlussuaq, which sits just off the rocky northwest coast of Greenland, is also home to one of the largest glaciers in the world, one that is melting speedily, pouring freshwater and the occasional iceberg into Baffin Bay. After getting properly outfitted for our trip to NEEM the next day - our weather forecast is in the teens, but temperatures really can be polar even during the summer - we take a car trip out to the vanishing edge of the glacier, some 30 km outside town. It's the waning hours of the afternoon, though it's hard to tell; time loses...
Finally, the glacier itself: a sheer cliff of white bleeding into rock. It's moving - though we can't see it - but the melting is visible in a raging river that pours down its side, as if bleeding. The Greenlanders in our group say it melts more and more each summer and recovers less and less. Actually, the speed of the glacier toward the sea has slowed in recent years - but that's not because there's more ice. Paradoxically, because so much ice has melted away in central Greenland, there is less pressure on the coastal glaciers to move...