Coming Attractions: Dark Snow 2016

For those of you who helped out with funding Dark Snow Field Campaign 2016, just an update on what you helped support, and a hint at what’s coming in future posts and videos.

I’m getting back up to speed, and currently working on a new “This is Not Cool” video, but in the background trying to organize the wealth of new material gathered during June and July.
This year’s trip was a unique opportunity to sample a cross section of Greenland ice, science, and society. In coming months you’ll be seeing the fruits of that very intensive labor.

I spoke to and traveled with scientists from two major scientific efforts, the fantastic UCLA team that is measuring ice melt, and the Black and Bloom group from the UK which is applying major resources and manpower to the original Dark Snow question – what is making the ice sheet darker, and how will that affect us?

Over the course of many hours and many conversations, what emerges is a much more detailed, and surprising – to say the least, set of questions as to how water is moving on,in,under and off, the Greenland ice – a topic of critical importance in projecting sea level in the near future and beyond.

One surprising insight came from a Native Elder who told me the story of when hunters in his ancestral region first recognized that profound changes were happening on the Big Ice – and how those indigenous observations relate to the most recent scientific discoveries.

At the front end, I also collected half a dozen interviews at a key Arctic Conference in Sweden that will also be part of posts and videos in coming months – including this fall’s Arctic Sea Ice vid.

There will be more to come – I’m traveling again in October with Rolling Stone’s Jeff Goodell to investigate impacts of Sea Level change at Miami’s ground zero.  More on that in coming weeks.