Word: polarity
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...despite the Jimi Hendrix playing on the dome's stereo and the empty mini-kegs of Heineken, this isn't polar summer camp. The scientific work being done at NEEM is as hard as it is necessary. About a mile (1.6 km) outside the main camp, Danish scientists Steffen Bo Hansen and Sigfus Johann Johnsen drill holes 70 meters down. The ice beneath NEEM is more than a mile and a half (2.5 km) thick, the result of over 130,000 years of accumulated snow. Tiny air bubbles from the year the snow fell are trapped in layers of frost...
...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 to you by the U.S. Air Force? They didn't tell us it would be like this back in high school...
...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 is scary, when...
...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 the sort that never leaves their laptops. They're spiritual descendants of the polar explorers who crossed the ice over a century ago with dogs and sleds and little else, who - as Rajenda Pachauri, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and one of our traveling group, says - "never knew whether they'd come back alive." Sometimes it can seem that a sense of adventure...
...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 its meaning during an Arctic summer. As we drive down Kangerlussuaq...