Word: icing
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...Ice-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...
...early wake-up call wasn't quite necessary - our flight out was, of course, delayed by an hour. Ice-cap flights have an on-time record that makes United's look meticulous, but at least there's an excuse here. Weather in Greenland is changeable, and even in the summer, hardly perfect for flying. It's not unusual for flights to be delayed for hours, even canceled altogether, sometimes stranding people on the ice cap for days at a time. We were lucky - our plane did depart, and landed safely at NEEM some two-and-a-half hours later. There...
...ice cap is white, blinding and endless. At NEEM we're 77 degrees latitude north of the equator and nearly 2,500 meters above sea level, all of it accumulated snow and ice - some 130,000 years worth, which is what the scientists at NEEM eventually hope to drill through. The polar horizon stretches to all sides without landmarks, save for the black and red flags that mark the boundaries of the camp, the red sleeping tents and the heated main dome, a geodesic wooden structure that is the kitchen, conference center and overall heart of NEEM. The result...
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...