Word: icing
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, the Danish leader of the NEEM project, greets us on the ice with her team, and takes us back to main dome via NEEM taxis - sleds pulled by snowmobiles. The scientists and staff attached to NEEM are mostly Danish, with a sprinkling of other nationalities: a couple of Americans, Belgians, French and a South Korean. Lingua franca is English, with liberal amounts of Danish mixed in. When we arrive, we are given breakfast, and we soon learn that the preparation and consumption of food takes up a significant slice of time at NEEM. It might...
...there's no shortage of work to be done. A kilometer and a half outside the main camp, Sigfus Johann Johnsen and Steffen Bo Hansen drill for shallow ice cores. This is a side project, a much smaller drill that can bore down 70 m or so below the surface, which covers the past few hundred years of climatic history. At this depth 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...
From there, the ice cores are taken to the "cold room," a hollowed out cave about 6 m below the surface, where drillers will carve the cores in sections, to be bagged, tagged and eventually flown back to the Center for Ice and Science in Copenhagen, where they will be fully analyzed. The work is done underground to make sure the ice stays stable - though we're far above the Arctic Circle, with the open sun the temperature is only -6 degrees or -7 degrees C, though the wind can make it feel worse on the open snow. The sprawling...
...liter Heineken mini-kegs. Jimi Hendrix and Dr. Dre are playing on the stereo in the main dome. NEEM has no shortage of grad students like Trevor Popp, who describes himself as "34 going on 12," and they know how to have fun. Don't get me wrong. Ice-core science is all hard work - especially the painstaking analysis of the ice cores back in the lab - but only a certain kind of scientist chooses to spend weeks on an isolated ice cap, and I suspect that kind of scientist is a lot more fun to hang out with than...
After a series of post-dinner presentations, we drink whiskey cooled by ice cubes cut from some of the spare cores, dating back to 1816 exactly. One by one we head off to our assigned sleeping tents, bunk bags and bags, where the air is only a little warmer than it would be outside. I suppose my body clock has caught up with wherever I am, because I fall asleep immediately, and deeply. I wake up once in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, and stagger outside, shivering. It's 2 a.m., and the sun is bright...