Sweden’s Icebreaker for Petermann Gletscher 2015

Sweden’s icebreaker I/B Oden will sail for Greenland this summer to pick up about 50 scientists to work the ice, land, water, and glaciers of north-west Greenland with Petermann Gletscher as its focus. I will be working with Celine Heuze of Gothenburg University, Jari Kruetsfeldt of Stockholm Technical University, and Christina, a Swedish High School teacher. Together we are responsible to run the water sampling and ocean sensing.

We met 3 weeks ago on the ship in Landskrona, Sweden where we loaded all our boxes filled with computers, electronics, bottles, rubber hoses, and some more computers. We also met the ship’s crew and a larger group of scientists and engineers from Oregon State University in the US, Gothenburg and Stockholm Universities in Sweden, and the Swedish Polar Research Secretariat that runs the ship. For 3 days we worked, ate, slept (somewhat), and worked some more to get ourselves and our equipment unpacked and organized.

There is nothing romantic about working in an industrial area lugging boxes and stuff up and down stairs from back to front and back again. Despite all the cranes, winches, fork lifts, A-frames, and other tools, it is still back-breaking labor as much is still carried to and fro by hand while watching for heavy loads overhead, sharp corners below, and tight corners to maneuver around. Hard-hats and steel-toed boots are NOT optional. The only positive here is that shared pain brings people together to lower the pain via teamwork.

While most people seem fresh and happy, this wears off after 3 days of intense work not captured in photos. Sleep deprivation sets in as everyone tries to cram too much work into the 24 hours available. And yet, it is during these short and intense work periods, that new friendships and scientific collaborations emerge quickly even though people do not always look their best.

As an example, here is me as a zombie after about 4 nights with little sleep

As always, I try too much as I perform my duties on the water sampling and ocean sensing during the day and fight a nasty Iridium satellite communication problem  at night.  At the University of Delaware we designed, assembled, and shipped off to Sweden an air and ocean weather station to be deployed above and below the floating tongue of Petermann Gletscher. There was no time for testing as all gear to deployed on Petermann Gletscher in August had to be in Landskrona in May.

Despite the looks, I was ecstatic on the inside, because I had just solved a crucial sub-problem when an e-mail reached me that a small NASA grant was coming my way to actually pay for the science that I hope to do during this summer. This, however, is another story for another day.