Eating Musk Ox and Walking on the Greenland Ice Sheet

After some frustrating travel negotiations, I made it back from Greenland yesterday afternoon. But my last Greenland post was when I first arrived there, meaning I have a lot of catch up to do!

Why was I even in Greenland in the first place? I was there with my advisor and some colleagues collecting sediment and rock samples which we will use to get an idea of how the Greenland Ice Sheet has been behaving for the last 3-5 million years.

After arriving at the Kangerlussuaq International Science Support (KISS) Station, our crew, consisting of my advisor Paul, and colleagues Dylan and Jeremy, and myself, had a delicious and locally-cooked dinner of minced musk ox and noodles before taking a little walk around the mouth of the Watson River, looking for good sampling sites.

Roche moutinee outside of Kangerlussuaq

Paul, Dylan, and Jeremy trekking across the tundra

Walking over glacially polished bedrock in Kangerlussuaq

The crazy thing about Greenland during this time of the year is that the sun never sets. It lowers down on the horizon, but this far north it never gets dark! It totally screws with your internal clock if you do not prepare for it. Kangerlussuaq is just north of the Arctic Circle and even at midnight, the sun was still pretty high in the sky. I bought an eye mask beforehand, which really helped in our KISS rooms where our windows had no curtains! It is great for doing field work because you get up super early and just work until late, not knowing exactly how late it really is!

There are very few places to eat in Kangerlussuaq and we had breakfast at the cafe at the airport. Afterward, we packed our rental truck - a Toyata Hilux, which Paul swears by - and headed down the Watson River valley toward the Russell Glacier, a little tongue of the Greenland Ice Sheet. We stopped at a few places in the immense outwash stream and made our way down to the river to collect our samples. During the summer, these outwash streams become rushing torrents of water crashing their way down to the fjords carrying huge boulders and sediment away from the ice sheet.

The Air National Guard guys have set up an 18-hole golf course in the Waston River valley and it holds the title of "Most Northern Golf Course in the World"

Frozen ice beginning to melt as summer arrives on the Watson River

View over the Watson River valley with a glacier rising in the background

All of the signs in Greenland are either in Danish or Greenlandic.

As the day progressed we kept going up the river, and at one point crossed over what looked like a shallow, slowly flowing stream. We soon realized that the river water was frozen and we were walking over a thin veneer of ice under which more water was flowing. We walked on the ice upstream a ways

Ice crystals forming on the Watson River

Water flowing over a thin layer of sediment deposited on frozen river ice (the clear blotch in the center of the photo)

In some places the frozen ice we were walking on had split and sand was falling into it.

Continuing up the road, we got our first glimpse of the thing everyone in the climate change world is talking about (or being skeptical about). The Greenland Ice Sheet was no more than a few hundred meters from us! At first it looked like a large horizon of low-lying clouds, but as we got closer, we could see it was the edge of the world's second largest expanse of ice, in some places a few kilometers thick! We walked down to the gravel stream bed at the ice sheet's base and for a while, no one said anything. We just looked up and could not stop taking photos! We stood at the base of a 60-foot wall of blue ice. I have never seen anything like it in my life so far. At its base were large chunks of ice that calved off the front of the ice sheet sometime recently and while we were there we heard the glacier crack a few times. Nothing fell off, but it was astonishing nonetheless. On our way back up to the truck, we got our second glimpse of wildlife as an arctic fox sauntered in front of us (we saw a caribou earlier that day).

The Russell Glacier

Our crew in front of the Russell Glacier

The arctic fox (center)

Terminal moraine of the ice sheet and while the ice has not retreated much, you can see how much it has deflated from its former thickness

We kept on driving down the road and hiked down a lumpy, soggy terrain with one of the most spectacular landscapes I have ever seen. I really cannot get over just how immense and expansive the Greenland Ice Sheet really is. It literally blankets the landscape! And what is even more impressive is that what we saw is not even the tip of the iceberg (wah-wah, I know)!

We couldn't get to the outwash tunnel where Paul wanted to collect a sample, but we did get right up next to the ice sheet after precariously walking on what Paul believed to be ice 20 feet thick and we could hear the water gurgling under our feet! We saw these features called pingoes, which are mounds of ice that fractures up above the rest of the ice surface because the hydraulic pressure of the water coming out of the glacier is so high that the water shoots upward as soon as it exits the tunnel. That water freezes and eventually this little cracked mound forms.

It was getting late, but we didn't really realize it because the sun was still high. We had one more geotourism site to see before going back to KISS. We drove to the end of the road, a site called 660, and after walking over gigantic moraine deposits, we were able to walk out onto the ice sheet itself!! It is such an amazing landscape and none of my photos can possibly do it justice. Oddly, the ice sheet, with all of its wind-blown ridges of ice and divots of snow reminded me of little Lake Michigan sand dunes. Not the big giant ones, but the little ones - minus any signs of vegetation and completely white. Paul brought a pair of his nordic skis and after he tied his record of days on skis during one year, I donned the skis and can now say that I have skied on the Greenland Ice Sheet!! I had a hell of a time getting the boots into the skis, though, but once they were in, I was off! It was a poor showing of athleticism, but after a number of falls, I was able to do a little loop around the ice.

The Greenland Ice Sheet in all its glory!

Walking down to the ice sheet

Walking precariously on 20-foot thick ice with water running through it

Sometimes it is easier to slide down snow fields than to walk down them!

A pingo!

Me with the ice sheet

Up on top of the ice sheet. It is just a large expanse of white

Glacial moraine deposits in front of the ice sheet

Driving back to KISS, we took numerous photo stops. It was beautiful, but I was on the lookout for something I had only seen on my plate the night before: musk ox. I was reminded of Jurassic Park where the scientists were looking for dinosaurs from their jeeps but could not see anything. Though Wikipedia told me the world's largest herd of musk ox is in the Kangerlussuaq Fjord, I was disappointed I had not seen one yet! But my attentiveness paid off! We were driving down the road and, after claiming to have seen a musk ox multiple times when it turned out to just be big boulders on top of the hills, when I said, "I see musk ox!" my crew thought I was joking again. The sun was low in the sky and directly in our eyes, making it difficult for me to prove that the two lumps I was looking at were slowly moving and not rocks. Finally, Paul got out his telephoto lens and I was proven correct. They were a distance away so we didn't have a clear view of them, but there they were! In one day we had seen some of the Arctics most amazing wildlife: caribou, arctic fox, and musk ox!

Musk ox! (Yes, they really are)

We collected one more sample before arriving back at the KISS station around 10:30pm. It was well past dinner time, but we called in with our satellite phone and had the office staff order us some Thai food from the local Thai restaurant. Yes, of the three places to eat in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, above the Arctic Circle in a town of 500 people, there is a Thai restaurant. And it was delicious!!

It was still bright out by the time we went to bed at midnight, but we pulled our eyeshades on and went to bed. This was just day one, and the days seemed to keep getting better and better!