Ice Reflectivity expert Mckenzie Skiles arrived this morning in Kangerlussuaq, and the team is now together at the terminal waiting our flight to Nuuk, staging area for the next ice sheet attempt.(photo by Jason Box)
We spent the night at KISS (Kangerlussuaq International Science Support), revisiting the Polar Bear cafe – try number 43, the musk ox panang, or the musk ox pizza – and did follow up interviews at the Watson River bridge with Jason and ice sheet expert Dr. Alun Hubbard, which I’ll be integrating in a future video. Takehome message: the ice sheet is beginning to accelerate at depth, and Greenland is deglaciating at a rate not seen in 10,000 years.
Dr. Alun Hubbard, Glacier expert at Aberystwyth University(photo by Sara Penrhyn Jones)
With the arrival of JPL’s Mckenzie Skiles this morning, the team is now complete for our planned jump to the ice sheet on monday or tuesday. It’s a trip that is somewhat unusual, Jason calls it “adventurous”, for a chopper, and will require prepositioning of fuel at a depot along the flight path. Unusual enough that we’ll be needing an additional clearance from higher ups at Air Greenland monday morning.
Don’t leave home without it. Mckenzie Skiles’ spectrometer.
Among the items we checked thru Air Greenland this morning was the ice drill that Jason and Mckenzie will use to extract a core of the 2012 melt layer, which should not be that deep, but likely pretty solid ice due to the surface melt last year. In addition, Mckenzie has brought a spectrometer that will keep track of snow albedo.
Waiting out coastal fog in the Kangerlussuaq terminal, we’re all sipping coffee and catching up online.
Looking out over the inland ice sheet at 3 am this morning. We drove/hiked to the highest point in these parts, a knob called Sugarloaf, and watched the sun come over the edge of the Fjord.(photo by Sara Penrhyn Jones)Jason Box and myself on Black Ridge, overlooking the Watson River at Kangerlussuaq. In the distance you can see the airstrip, built originally during the cold war for B-52s. (photo by Sara Penrhyn Jones)
More evidence that rock music and humor have an uncontrollably corrosive effect on authoritarianism in any culture, any language. Chinese netizens are deconstructing propoganda video from the Cultural Revolution era and re-editing as music videos.
So, we are now back in Kangerlussuaq, having flown here this morning. We will be staying at KISS, Kangerlussuaq International Scientific Support – an old military barracks repurposed for international scientific teams to operate from – an ideal jumping off point for anywhere on the ice sheet or beyond.
At this point even if the Danish bureaucracy comes thru, its too late to execute our original plan. Plan B is now in effect, and we will be flying to Nuuk, the capital, where we would, weather permitting, fly with Air Greenland – a more expensive service, but very good – up to the topographic center of the ice sheet, where MacKenzie Skiles will be able to get her samples – ice and spectrographic measurements. The flight would require pre-positioning fuel at a midway point on the edge of the ice sheet so we could refuel going to and fro.
That would complete our basic mission. The flights are booked to get us up there, on a flexible, or easy to cancel, basis, so we can still adjust to the last minute.
There is a plan C, but I’m hoping we don’t have to go there.
Jason spent the afternoon fetching ice drill and snow pit equipment from a GEUS shipping container here on site, I took a much needed nap, and we made a run to the high rocks overlooking Kanger to shoot some more video and interviews. Tonight we will shoot some more video down by the Watson River Bridge, famously washed out during last year’s record melt.
The jet steam is exhibiting unusual behavior over the U.S., a pattern we’ve seen become increasingly common in summertime over the past decade. There’s a sharp trough of low pressure over the Central U.S., and equally sharp ridges of high pressure over the Western U.S. and East Coast. Since the jet acts as the boundary between cool, Canadian air to the north and warm, subtropical air to the south, this means that hot extremes are penetrating unusually far to the north under the ridges of high pressure, and cold extremes are extending unusually far to the south under the trough of low pressure. The ridge over the Western U.S., though slowly weakening, is still exceptionally intense.
This ridge, which on Sunday brought Earth its highest temperatures in a century (129°F or 54°C in Death Valley, California), was responsible for more record-breaking heat on Tuesday. July 2. Most notably, Redding, California hit 116°, just 2° short of their all-time record. Death Valley had a low of 104°, the second hottest night on record since 1920 (the hottest was just last summer!) Numerous daily high temperature records were set in Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, Montana, Oregon, and Washington. It was the opposite story in the Central U.S., where the southwards-plunging jet stream allowed record cold air to invade Texas. Waco, Texas, hit 58°F this morning (July 3), the coldest temperature ever measured in July in the city. Numerous airports in Texas, Nebraska, Arkansas, Louisiana, Kansas, and Missouri set new daily record low temperatures this morning. And over the Eastern U.S., the northward-pointing branch of the jet stream is creating a potentially dangerous flooding situation, by pulling a moisture-laden flow of tropical air from the Gulf of Mexico over the Florida Panhandle north-northeastward into the Appalachians. Up to five inches of rain is expected over this region over the next few days, and wunderground’s severe weather map is showing flash flood warnings for locations in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina.
Figure 1. Jet stream winds in the upper atmosphere at a pressure level of 300 mb on July 3, 2013. The jet had an unusually extreme configuration for summer, with a sharp trough of low pressure over the Central U.S., and equally sharp ridges of high pressure over the Western U.S. and East Coast. Image from the wunderground jet stream page.
We awakened on July 2 to find Sisimiut enshrouded in Fog. The meeting of moist and dry airmasses in this sliver of land between ocean and ice makes for dramatic contrasts that change hourly and unpredictably.
You can watch the fog slowly dissipate in the video above. I pulled out a single frame that showed a local resident who briefly landed in front of the camera. Anyone that can identify this, let me know.
Not long after the fog rolled out, it rolled back in again. Air Greenland was able to sneak one flight into the airfield before the white out returned. I set up my camera to record, but while I was inside working, a new visitor stopped by to take in the view. See if you can catch the frame in the video here.
Our helicopter situation grows increasingly problematic. We will need a positive resolution of our provider’s bureaucratic snafu in very short order, or we may have to go to some undesirable plans B and C. July 4 will be a key decisionmaking day.
In this time lapse, you can see the sun has disappeared behind the mountains ringing Sisimiut, but is still above the horizon.
As it plays on the clouds, you can track it’s movements on the sky for some time.
I saw this shot developing just before midnight as the clouds moved in, set up the GoPro just outside the cabin, and went to bed.
Jason Box and filmmaker Sara Penrhyn Jones continue to push out the science and media components of the Dark Snow Project.
We hope to find out more today about our transportation situation, and make plans for the coming week. Our chopper provider is still hamstrung by bureaucratic red tape out of Denmark. A new member of the science team, Mackenzie Skiles, will be arriving soon, so the need for a plan is becoming more urgent.
For now, we are socked in by fog anyway, so there would be no flying today under the best circumstances. We continue to push out media and work with media contacts who are increasingly interested in our project.
Our helicopter situation grows increasingly problematic. We will need a positive resolution of our provider’s bureaucratic snafu in very short order, or we may have to go to some undesirable plans B and C. July 4 will be a key decisionmaking day.