Images of

THE ARCTIC

Jakobshavn and Russell Glaciers

Photos © 2005 Seth White

Home

Funny to be writing this page about Greenland as I sit in Phase 2 of the Crary Lab at McMurdo, looking out the window across McMurdo Sound. But the past two months of my life have been a whirlwind with the Greenland trip, starting a new job, moving out of my house, and getting ready for the summer season at McMurdo. Not much time for anything else, like blogging for example. Anyway, we arrived at McMurdo about 10 days ago and it's been a flurry of activity since then. But some weather rolled into McMurdo today, so I spent some time doing stuff around the station and figured I would put a few pictures up tonight from my trip out of Summit Camp in August. If you have read any of the other pages on this site, you are probably accustomed to words like "amazing", "incredible", "unbelievable", and other superlatives. I suppose those kind of words get overused as I type and it probably is a little trite to do it again. Here goes anyway: this trip was "fantastic". Here's a photo of Jason, Tom, Nick, and Billy as the plane idles in the background. It was a great stay at Summit - the people were excellent, the weather left us alone, and all the work got done. It wasn't quite the same as it was last August, but then again I didn't really expect it to be. Last August at Summit was the best experience I've ever had on the ice. A few days ago I ran into Jen (operator at Summit last August), who was on her way to Pole for the summer. We talked for a while, and during our conversation she mentioned the same thing - that if she ever went back to Summit she wouldn't expect it to be as good an experience. But then again, I did meet some new people this year whose company I enjoyed, and a few of them like Billy, Mark, and Burmy are here at McMurdo right now. But I gotta say...for the first week, it was pretty strange being back at McMurdo again. Everything is different, but it's all still the same too. Very hard to explain - for my first few days here, I was walking around in a weird headspace, not knowing quite what to make of the whole thing. But it's been two weeks now, and I'm pretty much settled back into the place.

On our flight out from Summit, the ANG took the scenic route by flying west to the coast over the Jakobshavn Glacier, then south to Kangerlussuaq. No complaints from any of the passengers. As we flew down the glacier, they dropped a bit in elevation and we got a closeup of this gigantic thing. And it was one hell of a rugged scene below.

This glacier feeds a wide river which is choked with icebergs flowing out to sea. Here's the terminus.

A shot of the river below, with the plane's shadow. This area, by the way, is technically (and not surprisingly) called an "isfjord".

We came to a town on the coast, which had to be Jakobshavn. I am sure it is known officially by its Inuit name, but it's after-dinner at McMurdo and the peak time of day for internet usage. So I'm not going to pull up Google and find out. Seriously, this would probably take 5 minutes. OK, it's not THAT long a time to wait but I'm feeling kind of lazy after running around the station all day. So Jakobshavn it is. I sure hope I at least spelled it right.

Another picture of the town as we flew over. It's a marginal picture, but at least it shows what the town looks like. This is the Big City by Greenland standards.

We flew out over the sea a little into what I think is Disko Bay. Alright, I broke down and Googled it. The answer is that yes, this is Jakobshavn, aka Ilulissat, which sits on Disko Bay. And the glacier itself is the largest in the northern hemisphere. I had heard that Disko Bay was famous for its gnarly icebergs, and yeah, it's true. So maybe my memory isn't that bad after all? No, it is. Ask me what I did yesterday and you will get a dumb stare.

More bergs.

A fishing boat navigating through the ice. The plane was banking when I took this one and it turned out crooked. Usually I rotate and crop such pictures, but this one looks alright the way it is. (you see, Paola, I'm not always THAT picky about this ;-))

A beautiful stretch of coastline with icebergs floating off to their doom...and a tiny rise in the sea level. Has anyone reading this heard about the demise of the Larsen B ice shelf a few years back? This ice shelf, a floating mass of ice attached to Antarctica, simply disintegrated. Satellite images had shown increased surface melting on this ice shelf, so people knew something was up. But nobody expected it to just disappear. Well, this it did, and it didn't take long. Within the span of a day or two, it went from an ICE SHELF (!) to a mushy field of brash ice. Not icebergs, but actual brash ice. The resolution of the satellite images, which is pretty damn good, couldn't even pick up the outlines of the ice chunks when this was done. It was just mush. People used to think that yeah, some of the mid-latitude glaciers might disappear because of global warming, but certainly things like ice shelves were so huge that they wouldn't really notice the increased temperatures that much. Wrong. The more people study this stuff, the more they realize what a dire situation is brewing on our horizon. An article I read recently quoted people at NCAR predicting that (possibly) the entire Arctic ocean would be free from sea ice in the summer within several decades. Think about that for a second. Just over 100 years ago, Amundsen was the first to make it through the Northwest Passage from Greenland to Alaska. And it took him 3 years to do so. Now, within our lifetimes, ships might just be able to cruise across the entire Arctic Ocean. Shipping companies are preparing for this. If you are still "skeptical" about global warming and think that all these scientists are just pursuing some bizarre agenda with their papers and studies, consider the shipping companies. Do you think they would devote their money to something like this if it wasn't a real possiblity? Anyhow, I had heard about the Larsen B, but didn't realize the full enormity of such a thing until I saw a talk by Doug MacAyeal a few days ago. He and his group are here doing work on the giant icebergs recently spawned by the Ross Ice Shelf, and he gave a great talk about this and other fascinating things. He and his group are deploying some UNAVCO GPS receivers on these icebergs as well as a rift zone on the Ross Ice Shelf where the next great iceberg will break off. They ought to get some very interesting data from this.

A lake at the edge of the glacier. When we got back to Kangerlussuaq, all the people on board - even the old timers - agreed that it was a pretty bodacious flight. Doing work on the ice takes demands a lot from a person and comes with a good deal of stress. But you just can't beat this stuff.

We had two days in Kangerlussuaq before our flight back to the US. The first evening Bjorn suggested a bike ride out to the Russell Glacier. I probably wouldn't have gone out by myself, since I had biked back from the ice edge before and was kind of tired. The idea of just milling around Kanger the next day sounded pretty tempting, but I decided to come along because my experience has always been that you never really regret going for a bike ride, even if you might not really feel like it. Good call. It turned out to be even better than the bike ride last year. Here is a cabin we saw on the way, in a very pretty setting.

Some local color along the side of the road.

There is a turnoff to the right from the main road to the ice edge which takes you to the terminus of the Russell Glacier. So you ride along some sand flats by the river and before long the glacier comes into view. The white blur in the middle of the picture is a roaring falls that you can hear a long ways off.

So we rounded a bend and came to a smoothed out area where a couple Kangerlussuaq Tourism trucks were parked. And ambling by were two musk oxen - evidently a mother and a calf. We inched closer as they walked by and then watched them struggle to scramble up a rocky hillside. Turns out, there were about 5 more on the other side of the river. Unfortunately I didn't have my new camera yet so no telephoto zoom (rats). So here is the mother after sucessfully summitting this ridge.

Another one, on the other side of the river. A couple of them crossed over the river one by one and walked off to the east. One of these got caught in a current and almost went for a long ride downstream, but he/she caught itself and eventually made it across.

A few stayed on the other side of the river and began to walk up this large sand dune. Two of them then decided to put on a show for us and had a duel. Two musk oxen, fighting each other on the top of a sand dune, silhouetted against the sky. Talk about a National Geographic moment. But again, no telephoto so here you go - one lone musk ox posing on the sand. After this, we left the bikes and followed the first two for a while, finding some of their hair stuck on the bushes. Then they disappeared from sight and we continued on to the glacier itself.

So we picked up another road and followed it along the river. I'm still awestruck by how these glaciers pile up huge moraines at their edges.

We ran across this old shack, presumably from the Air Force days. No idea what it was used for, but here's a photo.

Another neat thing along the way: a glacial spring. We stopped here for quite a while, since it was THAT cool. There were a few little springs bubbling up noiselessly from below, pushing the sand around as they bubbled. Nice colorful algae (or whatever) growing along the sides too.

FUNGUS!

So this is the place everyone talks about when referring to the Russell Glacier. The ice towers above the river as it rushes by, and in fact the river has cut a tunnel underneath the ice about 1/2 mile further upstream. Howdja like to kayak that? This is an active face, so every now and then chunks will crash down from above. Farther ahead, there were ice blocks laying quite far away from the glacier face itself - on both sides of the river. This appeared to be nature's way of telling us to keep our distance ;-). We hung out for a long time there, and heard lots of groans and cracks. But no big calving events, just little ones. Some hikers were around as well, presumably Danish, but we pretty much had the place to ourselves.

So after the glacier passes over the river (or after the river passes under the glacier, your choice), the glacier is grounded on our side of the river. Some parts of this face didn't *look* very active (off to the left) so we walked up and checked it out. The ice itself at the very edge where it's rapidly melting consists of little crunchy pebbles.

The whole scene reminded me of Moab in white - rugged rocky scenery with huge cliff walls and pinnacles above. A fortress for the ice gods.

There are some pretty striations in the rock here, which go well with the lines in the ice. Maybe I'll Photoshop that jet contrail out of the photo someday.

Last and least, the obligatory hero shot.