Ok, this isn’t a story about a real vacation in Greenland. This is more of a brief diary of a trip I took in May of 2005 to various places in Greenland while doing ice research.

This wasn’t my first time in Greenland, and probably not my last, but this was the first time that I actually wrote down the events of each day regularly. I have some pictures to illustrate what it was like to be there and show a little bit about the work that we did while there (that’ll come later). Note: I switch back and forth between present and past tense in what I wrote, so try not to get too confused.

Greenland isn’t a particularly popular place to go – in fact, outside of the circle of people that I work with on a regular basis, I have only met one other person that has been to Greenland. His name was Bill, and he was about 45 years older than me and in a class I was taking during my college years. Bill was secretive about his experiences in Greenland (I suspect largely because not much happened to him during his years of working there) and had an insistence on wearing shorts during the dead of winter while the rest of us were bundled up like normal people. He probably worked in a now-defunct radar station or something similar – he was a pretty smart cat and probably was some sort of engineer or mathemagician. Now all I know about him is that has taken classes at Salisbury University out of boredom and brews beer at his home in Bishopville. Who’da thought that I, too, would end up seeing that unusual and remote part of the world? I certainly didn’t.

This trip was by far the nicest of the three trips that I have been on; the last one was in 2003, and the previous trip in 2002. This year was unique in that we had no major aircraft problems (one of the plagues of remote sensing) and we had a pilot that was dead-on with his weather predictions and was motivated as much or more than us “scientists” to fly at every possible opportunity. This meant that we got a lot of work done in a short period of time, without missing much of the planned data lines.

What’s a data line, I hear you wondering? Take a look at the following picture.

See all those red lines on the map? Those are data lines – meaning that they mark the flights that we made over Greenland and northern Canada. Notice that most of the lines over Greenland are close to the coasts – near glacier outlets – which are the most active portions of Greenland as far as mass change is concerned.

The big clump of red next to the label “Ilulissat” is an area of dense flight lines. A particularly interesting and fast moving glacier, the Jacobshavn Glacier, was of particular interest and therefore deserved a lot of flight time. A LOT of flight time. But it was only a good thing, because Ilulissat is now my favorite place in Greenland to go. It is a very picturesque place, and the people that I met there were wonderful.

The terminus of the Jacobshavn glacier has been receding very quickly and noticeable over recent years. If I can find the latest plot to illustrate that, I’ll put it right here.

Now, on to the day-to-day entries.

May 9, 2005
After a near-miss at the airport in Copenhagen (my flight was almost 30 minutes late, and I had 45 minutes to make my connection flight to Sondrestrom – which is also called Kangerlussuaq) I was finally able to relax after arriving around 9:30 AM local time in Kangerlussuaq. We met with Robin at the gate (which was somewhat by accident) followed by an unexpected reunion with the BBC guys that were on the Chile missions late last year. We collected our things and headed towards the KISS building, where we’d be staying for the night. The buildings in Kanger are mostly remnants of the former US Air Force occupation – cold, concrete looking things. Here is a (not very good) picture out of the room of my window showing the building across from where we were staying, which looked exactly like the one I was in aside from the color of the front of the building.

We made one big mistake with coming to Sondrestrom on a Monday: Nordley’s was closed. (Nordley’s happens to be the place to go if you want to shoot a game of pool and have a beer. There aren’t many places like that here).

After an uneventful day and a nice walk to the airport and back, we had dinner at the new cafe that was located in what used to be the Polar Bear Inn (which is no longer a cafeteria, but contains the aforesaid mentioned cafe, a small store, and a bar). Hotdog and a ¼ liter soda for $10, can’t beat those prices. Earl and I went to the ‘new’ bar in the same building and had a beer, with the price of Earl’s Carlsburg topping that of my own Tuborg by a couple of dollars (once you’re paying over $6 for a beer, a buck or two difference doesn’t really matter anymore)

May 10, 2005
The next morning we checked in at the airport early and headed off to Ilulissat. We’re staying at a place called the “Hotel Hvide Falk”, which is a rather nice place with an unbelievable view. Check out the great view (despite the not-so-great weather) from my window.

After checking in, we headed back out to the airport with the GPS equipment that had been previously shipped from WFF to the hotel. We had already met Finn from Alpha Air and he gave us access to what we needed to set up the GPS station.

After seeing off the BBC guys that we had already met up with the day before (which were being dropped somewhere via helicopter – Swiss Camp probably – they would end up being stuck there for two days longer than they had planned because of bad weather), we selected a suitable precipice near their building and eventually got the antenna set up somewhat properly. Earl took to the challenge of setting up the tripod on a sloped cliff and did rather well, even without my help.

We had a brief problem with the GPS station not tracking any satellites, but ended up doing a complete reset of the board and that seemed to take care of the problem. We were back on our way to the hotel around 5 PM and then took a brief walking tour of the town.

Here is another nice picture out of my back window around 10:30pm with the sun lower on the horizon and a different set of icebergs. As Erhardt always said, “A new view every day!”.

May 11, 2005
Ilulissat reminds me a lot of Longyearbyen (which is in Svalbard) as far as the scenery and feel of the place go, with biggest difference being the smaller mountains here and the large bay full of icebergs. Of course, Longyearbyen has much more of a “European” feel to it – I suppose that has something to do with it being owned by Norway. The town here is much less touristy – most of the people that live here probably actually came from here or some other place in Greenland. There are many Greenlandic natives here, with a population of perhaps 5000 people (which varies depending on who is driving you from the airport to your hotel, as I noticed). There around 3000 sled dogs in the town as well, which makes for some very unusual doggie-concerts during the night time. As Rachel later put it (something like this, anyway), “they have a million different songs” that they sing in chorus. Although they all sound the same to me, I have probably already heard 500 of them.

We’ll hopefully get to get some really nice pictures from the air when we’re flying over the glacier. Today we’re going to check the the GPS worked properly overnight and see that it recorded data ok – if we have any more problems with it, now is the time to get it fixed.

We don’t expect the plane (a Twin Otter leased from Borek ) from Canada until tomorrow at the earliest.

May 12, 2005
The last couple of days have been rather nice, since we’ve really just been waiting around and spending our time checking out the local attractions. After we sorted the GPS situation out, there really wasn’t much to do until the other guys got here.

The Internet situation here sucks a bit. It’s rather intermittent, and at this point I’ve given up on it for the most part. I’ve got enough internet back at home – its not like I miss having it. But at least I could post updates and find out what’s going on back at home if it worked ok. I’ll just have to wait to post anything online until I get home or have a more reliable connection. On the other hand, I’m surprised that they have anything at all – and not just dialup, but DSL! The internet connection itself works fine, but the crappy system that doles out login names and passwords for 30 minutes of internet useage (at $5.00 a pop) doesn’t work for anything. Hard to believe a company would sell such a system to a hotel that doesn’t work.

It’s snowing outside at the moment – hopefully the weather will be better tomorrow so that we can perhaps have an afternoon mission. Jim, Pannir, and Sonntag are coming on a KingAir from northern Canada, while the twin otter is going to fly empty to get here. Apparently the otter can’t ferry people onboard – (I don’t know why they couldn’t have just taken data and ‘pretended’ to be on a mission flight so that they didn’t have to charter the extra aircraft, but I’m sure someone already thought of that).

I went on two hikes already with Earl in the area – pretty easy hikes, but rather nice despite the crappy weather that we’re having. The view wasn’t as nice as a clear day, but we pretty much had to take advantage of the time we have now, since it’s entirely possible that there won’t be any free time after this. That is, if the weather clears up.

Below is a picture from one of our hikes: you might be able to barely make out the shape of Earl far off in the distance. Maybe I’ll get to take better pictures when the weather clears up. I took video of the ‘field of dogs’ – one of the places where the sled dogs are kept – but not pictures, unfortunately. Maybe I’ll get a picture some other time.

May 13, 2005
The twin otter arrived today. Earl and I went to the airport two hours early “just in case” we had been misinformed about their arrival time, which turned out to be what happened (or else they just had a great tailwind). I went over the installation and heating issues with Jim, and then he headed back to Canada on the KingAir. We decided to fly a mission that afternoon right away since the weather seemed to be pretty good.

It ended up being a rather short mission – low clouds started rolling in and we flew back to the airport after flying a portion of the lines for that mission.

Here is what the inside of the airplane looks like from my point of view, looking forward. You can see John up there scratching his head in amazement / bewilderment / anger / constipation.

May 14, 2005
Today we left early for the airport with great weather in the area. We flew the first 4 hour mission in the morning over the Jacobshavn glacier and got back around 1pm (which happened to be the time that the counter that sells food at the airport closes, which meant no lunch for us. I knew I should have brought a sandwich from breakfast with me, despite the snide comment from Earl, “Whattya, too cheap to buy lunch?”) Anyway, we fueled up and took off again for another set of lines close to the lines of the morning, in the area of the glacier.

We landed sometime later and after some discussion during the flight, decided that we’d go for a third flight since the weather was optimal (which is something we had never done before in a Twin Otter – we had flown two flights per day in Antarctica, but never three). Perry , the co-pilot, was probably feeling pretty bad since he had been sick the night before – three four-hour flights is a lot of flying for one day especially when you’re not feeling well.

After all was said and done, we arrived back at the hotel around 11:30pm or so. We were all pretty tired, but the pilot Jim and the mechanic Liam and I went downstairs to the bar and had a beer (and afterwards to the “pub” called Murphey’s where they had live music). I was exhausted, I can only imagine what the pilots must have felt like.

We met up with the air traffic controller in the pub and had a couple of drinks with him – he was the one that suggested we go there over the radio as we were taxiing in that evening. He bought Jim (the pilot) and I a few drinks, saying “I’m gonna make sure you’re not flying tomorrow!”. It was in his interest, too, since if we flew on Sunday then he would have to drag himself out of bed to the tower to see us off and get us back in safely (the airport is normally closed on Sunday).

After the pub closed (and Jim and Liam had already left me), I found myself standing outside with the air traffic controller waiting to find out “where the party was”. I first met Peter there, when he asked me politely to hold his beer while he went for a tinkle. After a while I realized that I didn’t know if he was coming back, and the traffic controller offered to relieve me of my load. Peter returned, of course, and so I directed him to the new owner of his beer.

I went with the crowd to somebody’s place where there was more drinking and carrying on, and where I met up with Peter again and met Rachel, a very nice Greenlandic girl that was a student in Ilulissat. During our conversation, in my arrogance I said “Why would you want to go to Thule?”, as she and others talked about one day going there as if it were a desirable place to go. After telling them, “Yeah, I’ve been there, there’s nothing there to really make me want to go there again. In fact, I’d avoid it if possible!”. I didn’t realize they were talking about the real Thule, not the Air Force base we commonly call Thule that is actually called Pituffik. The real Thule is further north of the Air Force Base in Pitufik, and therefore, a completely different place. Here’s to alcohol and misunderstandings.

What a long day!

May 15th and 16th, 2005
The airport was closed (both days) and we would have had to pay have it opened if we had good weather, but as it turns out it was pretty bad. It turned out to be really good that we had flown the three missions on Saturday while we had good weather – it saved us at least a day!

I spent most of the day during the 15th just resting, with a short trip in the evening to meet Rachel’s ten sled dogs. She showed me how they are fed with halibut carcasses (and other leftovers) and explained all of their names to me, which I promptly forgot right afterwards. Would have been a good opportunity to take pictures of the doggies, but I didn’t take my camera. Go figure.

May 17th,2005

Today we flew to Kulusuk from Ilulussat. We flew a line south from Ilulussat to Kangerlussuaq and refueled there, and then took off for Kulusuk. The flight over the middle of Greenland isn’t so interesting (it’s just white everywhere), but the east coast is very scenic. As we came in for landing the air traffic controller warned us of a fog bank that was quickly moving in, and sure enough – just after we landed in Kulusuk a thick fog rolled in.

We met a very helpful Danish electrician that got us hooked up with ground power and made us a special cable that let us connect into the ground power boxes at the airport. We would have had real problems if he hadn’t been willing to come out there and fix the wiring problems (which were, admittedly, not our fault). He had a digital camera with him to collect ‘evidence’ that the guy doing his job previously did a shoddy job at it ( hich was obvious).

Here is a typical picture of the area on the east coast that we are in.

May 18th, 2005
After the fog burned off mid-morning, we flew the first set of lines north of Kulusuk over another fast moving glacier (Kangerlussuaq). The terrain over the east coast is quite jagged, so we had some pretty bumpy rides (but extremely beautiful. I took lots of video in this area). We did some lines of the next day’s mission on the way back to Kulusuk (over the Helheim glacier) so that we would have the possibility of having enough time to make the flight all the way back to Ilulussat the next day, weather permitting.

The next picture shows our plane sitting at the airport in Kulusuk after the fog cleared up. Notice it isn’t paved at all.

This area was extremely beautiful, and I took too many pictures to include here. But one of my favorite pictures from the whole trip was taken here. In the evening, as a bank of fog rolled in, I got a picture of John leaning down at the GPS station with a very pretty background of sunlight in the clouds. Here it is.

May 19th, 2005
Fog had rolled in the night before, and was still lingering around in the morning. We waited until the fog burned off and then flew our first set of lines to the north-west of Kulusuk, mostly over flat glacial areas and also the Helheim glacier again. We landed around lunchtime and refueled, broke down the GPS station, and took off again for the transit to Kangerlussuaq and then Ilulussat. You can see the end of the Hellheim glacier below.

The weather in Ilulussat was terrible – it had been socked in with fog since the 18th, and no planes had landed there since. We decided to take the chance that things might improve that afternoon and make our way there.

After arriving in Kangerlussuaq, the weather seemed to indicate that the fog had lifted a little bit and so we decided to continue on to Ilulussat. However, as we got close to the airport, the tower reported worsening conditions (the tower was only open waiting for us). Jim decided to take a look, but I was thinking for sure that we’d have to go back to Kangerlussuaq.

We overflew the airport a couple of times (I only saw it on the last pass, it was all white outside for me otherwise) and then they made a quick turn and we came in for landing. I think the fog ceiling was 500′ – so that made for an interesting landing. Not something I want to do again – I’ve got a video of the landing that might show how foggy it really was, but no pictures unfortunately. Very, very interesting landing.

May 20th, 2005
We’re totally socked in with fog, and the east coast doesn’t look too good at the moment. I’m glad we’re here, in any case, since I like this place the most. We will have to stick it out here until the weather shows signs of improvement along the east coast – all the way to Thule.

We plan on a fuel stop in a village called Upernavik on the way to Thule, and we hope to not have to stay there overnight. We have also been discussing going to Qaanaaq, which is north of Thule, in the case that we get to Thule too late to land (being the Air Force, they sometimes have very strict rules about keeping the airport open). Despite Jim saying that all his paperwork indicated that we could land until 7pm, John and Earl insisted that it probably wasn’t really the case. We decided to play it safe and not tempt the anger of the Air Force and plan for a very early take-off whenever we did end up going.

May 21st, 2005
Bad weather day again.

May 22nd, 2005
The weather looked better today, and was very clear in the area around Ilulissat. So instead of sitting around, we made another spontaneous flight over Jacobshavn even though it meant opening the airport on a Sunday just for us.

Upon arrival, we found that there weren’t any people at the airport. With our keycard not opening the sliding doors in the front of the airport, Liam showed us all how it was possible to muscle the grocery-store type doors open from the outside. It seemed like a good idea until I walked into the airport waiting area and heard a loud BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP from the alarm system detecting my illegal presence.

We quickly backed out of the main airport building, muscled the doors shut, pretended like nothing had happened, and just climbed over the airport fence instead to get to the plane.

Hrm… which is worse – breaking into the building, or climbing the fence? It didn’t matter at that point, since we’d done both. I was expecting the police to show up at any time, and at least yell at us for pulling such a stunt, but noone ever came. Later on, when I came back to the airport, I saw the police truck but no policeman around. They were probably looking at the videotapes and laughing at us.

I prepared the laser system like normal, but Earl took my spot on this flight as we were primarily flying for the radar only. I invited Rachel and Sidse out to see the plane and equipment, and Rachel took me up on the offer and got a look around the plane and even sat in the pilot’s seat for a while (I didn’t even get to do that!)

May 23rd, 2005
Today we left the wonderful town of Ilulissat and headed for Thule (Pitufik, mind you) along the west coast, via Upernavik. We made a brief fuel stop there and carried on towards Thule, with extensive areas fogged in between Upernavik and Thule. Aside from the disorienting fog, not much of interest happened on this flight. I kept my eyes open for polar bears but never saw any moving white animals below us… lots of seals, but no polar bears.

May 24th, 2005
There’s a first time for everything. And today was my first time to screw up my alarm clock and not get up on time while working in the field! Good thing it was on a day when we had a fairly flexible schedule. Somehow when I set my alarm ahead one hour for the time difference, I set it ahead 13 hours instead – so I could have been sleeping until that evening had my wonderful internal clock not woken me up right around the time I was supposed to start working. How convenient!

We spent only a short amount of time unloading the Otter, and by 10:30am everything was unloaded and in hangar 14. The Otter took off right after lunch and Jim, Perry, and Liam were back on the way to Canada. After talking with them so much about Canada (western), it made me want to go visit there – it sounds like it might be my kind of place.

The rest of the day that we spent working we were just packing up the equipment in the crates that we had there waiting for us.

May 25th, 26th , 2005
We spent these two days waiting in Thule. Not a lot happened, so I’ll summarize what I did in Thule by order of importance:
– Walked to the library several times to check email and figure out how to get picked up in the US at BWI
– Went to the Top Of the World Club, of course, during the evenings
– Ate nice meals in Dundas, the mess hall
– Bought two cans of salt-n-vinegar pringles, and ate them both. (I swore that they didn’t have them in Greenland, since I can hardly get them in Germany, but Rachel disagreed with me completely.)
– Watched a cool Danish animation three times called “The Trouble with Turkel” or something like that that kept playing on TV with English subtitles. It was really good.
– Slept a lot

May 27th, 2005
Today we flew back on the rotator to the USA. The flight itself was uneventful, but I got to see “Shark Tale” (or something like that) which I thought was friggin’ hilarious, even without the standard airline complimentary alcoholic beverage of my choice. I was sitting next to a guy that I thought was going to be a real pain to sit next to (he complained about everything, I was just really happy to have food served to me and a toilet nearby). He ended up being an interesting guy and had lots of pictures on his laptop from his biking trips around Thule.

My buddy Joel picked me up at BWI and I headed down to Annapolis for an evening of hanging out before heading down to the eastern shore, where I am from.

And that was the end of this trip, for the most part!

(Aside from the additional week of work in the US before returning to Germany, but that doesn’t count!)