Category Archives: Thule

Travels to Greenland in Winter

Posted on March 16, 2017 by | 6 comments

Waking up after 5 hours on a plane from Baltimore, Maryland to Thule, Greenland large white Pitugfik Gletscher distinguishes itself from the white sea ice by its ragged snout as the plane approaches my new home for the next 6 weeks. I am traveling with 9 midshipmen of the US Naval Academy of which two are women, their 4 professors, and bear guard from Alaska. We will be working and living together for the next 7 days.

Pitugfik Glacier during the early morning hours of Mar.-9, 2017.

A little further along the coast we enter Wolstenholme Fjord where from the plane wide cracks of open water stand out as black against the bluish white horizon. This will be the outer margin of where I plan to work the ice and ocean underneath the next 6 weeks. We need to stay on the shore side of this transition of land-fast to mobile sea ice. I have watched this boundary for the last 4 months with satellite imagery, but seeing with my own eyes is an entire different and humbling experience.

Sea ice near Kap Atholl with heads of open water that separate land-fast ice that does not move from mobile ice.

We land safely at the airport, get our passport stamped by Danish officials, pick up our luggage, and are received by wonderful people working for both NASA and the National Science Foundation. After a hearty lunch of dark rye bread and my beloved pickled herrings christmas arrives in the form of many carefully wrapped packages: I try to find my Arctic clothing that I shipped months before. It is much-needed as the -33 C take your breadth away. I also find the 2,500 lbs of science gear, some of which had arrived directly from Canada after it was ordered Dec.-10, 2016: Without this $22,000 electrical winch, I would be hard pressed to send sensors to the bottom of the ocean and back. Everything appears to be in place and fine, but some acoustic gear is still missing as its large lithium batteries need diplomatic clearances which takes a little longer. Perhaps they will be on the plane that is about to land. There is only 1 flight per week that connects Thule to the US. Hence advance planing is needed and those lithium batteries are not needed until April 6 when Lee and Taylor arrive from Massachusetts.

Where in this pile are my snow boots? Palletized gear on arrival in Thule Greenland.

The next day we put some of our gear out to measure how thick the sea ice is near the coast. While drilling a hole requires power tools, the ice is actually cut by a razor-sharp drill bit that is sensitive to damage when it refuses to cut the ice and no amount of force available can force it through the 3-4 feet of ice we find. We all learn the hard way when we accidentally drill into the frozen sea bed without finding any water. One drill bit down, we only got 2 more and are much, much more careful with it. The remaining drill bits have to last for the next 6 weeks … actually, they do not, because I can change the blades should one bit become dull. [I did not tell this the Naval Academy guys who were doing much of this drilling to support NASA’s Operation IceBridge.]

And on this note, I am heading out to sea at 7:59 am to drill one more hole to prepare for a first mooring deployment. A wooden stick without sensors attached will simulate a mooring that I want to recover after it is frozen in. More later …

P.S.: More photos and stories on this week’s adventures can be found at

https://www.facebook.com/USNAPolarScienceProgram/

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Posted in Greenland, Ice Cover, sea ice, Thule

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Preparing Ocean Work outside Thule Air Base

Posted on March 6, 2017 by | 5 comments

I am heading to North Greenland in 3 days time to work where temperatures will be close to -20 F. The ocean is covered by 3-4 feet of sea ice that is frozen to land. We will drill lots of ice holes to deploy ocean sensors that will connect via cables to weather stations and satellite phone. Fancy $20,000 GPS units will measure the tides across the fjord and provide a group of future Naval officers a reference for their fancy electronic gear to measure sea ice thickness remotely by walking and comparing results to those obtained from planes overhead. Cool and cold fun.

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The ocean pier at Thule Air Base in Greenland in March 2017. The view is towards the north-west along my proposed mooring line [Photo Credit: Sean Baker]

There has been much packing and shipping the last weeks, about 2300 lbs to be precise,which made my body stiff and sore. Another way to hurt my aging body was to learn shotgun shooting for the unlikely polar bear encounter on the sea ice. My shoulder still hurts from the recoil blasts of the 12 gauge pump-action gun with 3” long cartridges that included a 1 oz. lead slug. I also tested a cot and sleeping bag that will be with me on the ice for emergencies. The night in my garden a few days ago was cozy, but the cot required an insulation mattress, as it was too close to the ground. It was rough sleeping, because of unexpected noises not cold, but I did sleep some and woke up when the sun came up.

Cot, air mattress, and down sleeping bag testing in my garden after a rough night.

Cot, air mattress, and down sleeping bag testing in my garden after a rough night.

The clear skies over Thule during the 2 weeks that the sun is up again also gave me the first Landsat image. It shows the landfast sea ice, but it also shows its very limited extend as very thin ice and perhaps even open water occurs while the winds blow along the coast from the north. This cold wind moves the mobile sea ice offshore to the west thus opening up the oceans that will promptly freeze, however, the back ocean still shows under the inch-thin new ice:

Wolstenholme Fjord as seen by LandSat on Feb.-27, 2017. The line with the red dots extends from Thule pier seaward towards the north-west. Note the dark spot near the left-top corner that shows thin new ice or even open water. White contours are ocean depths in meters.

Wolstenholme Fjord as seen by LandSat on Feb.-27, 2017. The line with the red dots extends from Thule pier seaward towards the north-west. Note the dark spot near the left-top corner that shows thin new ice or even open water. White contours are ocean depths in meters.

This thin new ice is the limit of where I expect to be working. After measuring ice thickness directly via drilling through the ice, my first measurement will be that of how temperature and salinity varies from under the ice to the bottom of the ocean.

Working on the sea ice off northern Greenland [Photo credit, Steffen Olsen]

Working on the sea ice off northern Greenland [Photo credit, Steffen Olsen]

Danish friends do this routinely about 60 miles to the north where they work out of the Inughuit community of Qaanaaq, but Inglefield Fjord is much deeper and connects to warm Atlantic waters from the south that, I believe, we do not have in Wolstenholme Fjord. Hence I expect much less heat inside Wolstenholme Fjord and perhaps a different response of three glaciers to ocean forcing. This theory does not help me much as I will have to lower instruments via rope and a winch into the water. How to attach rope to instruments and winch? Knots.

I am very poor at making knots as my hand-eye co-ordination and memory is poor. So I spent some time this week to learn about knots such as

that should work on my braided Kevlar lines that I connect to shackles

Fancy knots on shackles in my home office ... yes, Peter Freuchen is on the bookshelf, too.

Fancy knots on shackles in my home office … yes, Peter Freuchen is on the bookshelf, too.

There are always devils in the many details of field work. Another worry is that my 10” ice-drill is powered by 1 lbs bottles of propane. It is not possible to send these camping propane canisters via air, but larger 20 lbs tanks exist in Thule for grill cooking at the NSF dormitory where I will be staying. So I also will have to learn how to fill the smaller container from the large one. Just ordered another adaptor from Amazon to travel with me on my body to do this.

I am both terribly nervous and excited about the next 6 weeks. This is my first time working on the ice, because before I have always been on icebreakers in summer. These past Arctic summer expeditions on ships created an unreal and distant connection that, I hope, will be shattered by this spring. I will get closer to the cold and icy seas that are my passion. Oceanography by walking on water … ice.

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Posted in Greenland, Ice Cover, Oceanography, sea ice, Thule

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Sea Ice from Satellite at 20-m Resolution

Posted on February 7, 2017 by | Leave a comment

I am a self-taught amateur on remote sensing, but it tickled my pride when a friend at NASA asked me, if I could tell a friend of his at NOAA on how I got my hands on data to produce maps of radar backscatter to describe how the sea ice near Thule Air Base, Greenland changes in time and space.

Wolstenholme Fjord, Greenland Feb.-5, 2017 from Sentinel-1 radar. The data are at 20-m resolution

Wolstenholme Fjord, Greenland Feb.-5, 2017 from Sentinel-1 radar. The data are at 20-m resolution

In about 4 weeks from today I will be working along a line near the red dots A, B, and C which are tentative locations to place ocean sensors below the sea ice after drilling through it with ice fishing gear. The colored line is the bottom depth as it was measured by the USCG Healy in 2003 when I was in Thule for the first time. Faint bottom contours are shown in gray.

I discovered the 20-m Sentinel-1 SAR-C data only 3 weeks ago. They are accessible to me (after making an account) via

https://scihub.copernicus.eu/dhus/#/home

where I then search for a specific geographic area and time frame using the following “product”

Product Type: GRD
Sensor Mode: IW
Polarization: HH

Screenshot on how I search for the Sentinel-1 SAR-C DATA.

Screenshot on how I search for the Sentinel-1 SAR-C DATA.

The more technical detail can be found at

https://sentinel.esa.int/web/sentinel/user-guides/sentinel-1-sar

where one also finds wonderful instructional videos on how to work the software.

The data file(s) for a typical scene are usually ~800 MB, however, for processing I use the free SNAP software (provided by European Space Agency) via a sequence of steps that result in a geotiff file of about 7 MB.

Screenshot of SNAP software and processing with [1] input and [2] output of the Feb.-5, 2017 data from Wolstenholme Fjord.

Screenshot of SNAP software and processing with [1] input and [2] output of the Feb.-5, 2017 data from Wolstenholme Fjord.

This .tiff file I then read with Fortran codes to tailor my own (quantitative or analyses) purposes.

Start of Fortran code to covert the SNAP output geotiff file into an ascii file with latitude, longitude, and backscatter as columns. The code has 143 lines plus 80 lines of comment.

Start of Fortran code to covert the SNAP output geotiff file into an ascii file with latitude, longitude, and backscatter as columns. The code has 143lines plus 80 lines of comment.

The final mapping is done with GMT – General Mapping Tools which I use for almost all my scientific graphing, mapping, and publications.

Please note that I am neither a remote sensing nor a sea-ice expert, but consider myself an observational physical oceanographer who loves his Unix on a MacBook Pro.

Working the Night shift aboard CCGS Henry Larsen in the CTD van in Aug.-2012. [Photo Credit: Renske Gelderloos]

Working the Night shift aboard CCGS Henry Larsen in the CTD van in Aug.-2012. [Photo Credit: Renske Gelderloos]

If only my next problem, working in polar bear country with guns for protection, had as easy a solution.

Polar bear as seen in Kennedy Channel on Aug.-12, 2012. [Photo Credit: Kirk McNeil, Labrador from aboard the Canadian Coast Guard Ship Henry Larsen]

Polar bear as seen in Kennedy Channel on Aug.-12, 2012. [Photo Credit: Kirk McNeil, Labrador from aboard the Canadian Coast Guard Ship Henry Larsen]

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Posted in Computing, Greenland, Ice Cover, sea ice, Thule

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North Greenland Sea Ice: Wolstenholme Fjord and Thule Air Base

Posted on January 30, 2017 by | 1 comment

Greenland hunters, seals, and polar bears all need sea ice atop a frozen ocean to eat, breath, or live. The sea ice around northern Greenland changes rapidly by becoming thinner, more mobile, and less predictable as a result of warming ocean and air temperatures. I will need to be on the sea ice to the north and west of Thule Air Base in March and April about 6 weeks from to conduct several connected science experiments. The ice should be “land fast,” that is, it should be a solid, not moving plate of ice. The work is funded by the National Science Foundation who asked me to prepare a sea ice safety plan to keep the risk to people working with me to a minimum. In a science plan I included this satellite image of what the ice and land looked like in march of 2016:

Optical satellite image of Wolstenholme Fjord, Greenland on March-21, 2016 with Thule Air Base in bottom right. Darker areas show thin ice.

Optical satellite image of Wolstenholme Fjord, Greenland on March-21, 2016 with Thule Air Base in bottom right. Darker areas show thin ice.

This LandSat image captures the reflection of sun light during a cloud-free day at ~15 m pixel size. No such imagery exists for 2017 yet, because the sun does not set until late February with this US satellite overhead. The European Space Agency (ESA), however, flies a radar on its Sentinel satellite. This radar sends out its own radio waves that are then reflected back to its antenna. The radar sees not only during the polar night, it can also see through clouds. And ESA provides these data almost instantaneous to anyone who wants it and knows how to deal with large data files. If you think your 8 mega pixels are sharp, these images are closer to 800 mega pixels. Here are three such images from January 3, 24, and 28 (yesterday):

The lighter white tones indicate that lots of radar signals return to the satellite. The many tiny white specks to the south of the Manson Islands are grounded icebergs. The different shades of gray indicate different types of ice and snow. The Jan.-24 and Jan.-28 images show a clear boundary near longitude of -70 degrees to the north of the island (Saunders Island) that separates land-fast ice to the east from thinner and mobile ice in Baffin Bay to the west.

I plan to work from Thule Air Base (red dot bottom right) out along points C, B, towards A. The color of line near these points is a section where I have very accurate bottom depth from a 2003 US Coast Guard Icebreaker that was dropping off scientists at Thule on August 15, 2003. I was then one of the scientist dropped off after a 3 week excursion into Nares Strait and Petermann Fjord. Along this section I hope to test and deploy and under-water acoustic network that can send data via whispers from C to A via B. First, however, we will need to know how sound moves along this track and before that, for my ice safety plan, I will need to know how thick or thin the ice is. The imagery does not tell me ice thickness.

Flying to Thule Greenland with US Air force Air Mobility Command delivering cargo and people.

Flying to Thule Greenland with US Air force Air Mobility Command delivering cargo and people.

Arriving in Thule on Mar.-8, we will first need to measure ice thickness along this A-B-C section with a sharp ice-cutting Kovacs drill and a tape measure. The US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) distributes a “Handbook for community-based sea ice monitoring” that we will follow closely. This first ice survey will also give us a feel and visual on how the radar satellite imagery displays a range of ice and snow surfaces. One of my PhD students, Pat Ryan, will process and send us the ESA Sentinel-1 radar data while a small University of Delaware and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution group will work on the ice in early April.

The mental preparation for this scientific travel to Thule and the sea ice beyond gives me the freedom and pleasure to explore new data such as Sentinel-1 imagery and perspectives on tremendous local traditional knowledge of the Inugguit who have lived with the sea ice for perhaps 4000 years. The town of Qaanaaq is 45 minutes by helicopter to the north of Thule Air Base (TAB) at Pituffik. The town was established in 1953 when local populations living in the TAB area were forcibly removed. Despite these challenges the displaced people have prospered throughout the Cold War, but a less predictable and rapidly changing sea ice poses a severe threat to the community whose culture, health, and livelihood still depends on hunting and traveling on sea ice. Stephen Leonard is an anthropological linguist at the University of Cambridge who lived in Qaanaaq for a year in 2010/11 when he made this video:

P.S.: If possible, I would very much like to work with a local person who knows sea ice and wild life that we would need protection from. Danish contacts are reaching out on my behalf to people they know in Siorapaluk, Qaanaaq, and Savissivik.

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Posted in Greenland, Ice Cover, sea ice, Thule

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Polar Bears and Guns and Politics

Posted on December 20, 2016 by | 9 comments

Polar bears are endangered and need protection. They hunt and eat meat to survive. Seals are such meat as are scientists walking and working on the sea ice. I am planing an experiment in polar bear habitat. Do I need a gun to protect myself and my students working with me? About 10 people told me “YES” last week, all with experience working in polar bear habitat. Who am I to say no? Encounters between bears and people happen, but only rarely. None of the 10 people advising me to carry a shotgun or rifle ever discharged their weapon or had a bear encounter.

Polar bear as seen in Kennedy Channel on Aug.-12, 2012. [Photo Credit: Kirk McNeil, Labrador from aboard the Canadian Coast Guard Ship Henry Larsen]

Polar bear as seen in Kennedy Channel on Aug.-12, 2012. [Photo Credit: Kirk McNeil, Labrador from aboard the Canadian Coast Guard Ship Henry Larsen]

In 3 month’s time I hope to do ~20 day trips from Thule Air Base near Pituffik, Greenland to explore the oceanography and acoustics of the local fjord covered by sea ice. The US National Science Foundation supports this work, maintains a dormitory where we sleep, and provides us with two snowmobiles. We will use these motorcycles on skies to reach science stations on the ice covering Wolstenholme Fjord. We will drill 10” holes through 3-5 feet of sea ice, set-up an electric winch connected to a small generator, and probe the ocean’s temperature, salinity, bottom depth, and ice thickness to prepare for a quiet acoustic communication system to move data under water from the outer fjord to the pier at Thule and the internet.

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Leading this science effort, I will have to estimate and manage potential risks which include encounters with polar bears. I will have to decide how much money to allocate to each risk that then may not be available for other activities such as to support students, buy better sensors, or return in the summer. The first and almost always best response is to hire a local hunter who knows the area along with its bears, ice, and weather. There are about 600 people living in Qaanaaq about 100 miles to the north. Most of them are children and grand-children who were forcibly removed from Pituffik in 1952 when more than 13,000 Americans built a large air field during the height of the Cold War. The local llanguage spoken in remote Qaanaaq is the Inuktitut dialect of north-west Greenland, the first foreign language learnt in school is Danish, and English is not widely spoken, however, Qaanaaq has two non-Inuit villagers who originate from Denmark and Japan.

Relations between Qaanaaq and Thule Air Base are complex and sensitive with regard to politics and finances. One of many perspective is that of Kim Petersen who writes in Dissident Voice about “The Struggle against Colonialism and Imperialism in Kalaallit Nunaat.” Kalaallit Nunaat refers to Greenland in the local language. While the forced removal of native populations from Pituffik to Qaanaaq in 1952 and the crash of a nuclear armed B-52 bomber into Wolstenholme Fjord in 1968 are not in dispute, the political arguments presented seem to me rather narrow, one-dimensional, and rooted in a tired ideological Left-Wing mode of conspiracy-thinking. Does this perspective represent the community of Qaanaaq? Perhaps I need to ask someone who may know:

Working on the sea ice off northern Greenland [Photo credit, Steffen Olsen]

Working on the sea ice off northern Greenland [Photo credit, Steffen Olsen]

It is not straight-forward to bring a gun to Greenland as it requires a large amount of paper work. Another layer of regulations relates to bringing a gun to an US military installation. Shooting a polar bear is a burocratic and political nightmare, because strict quotas exist for the “taking” of polar bears. International complications include Canada, because the quotas are assigned to Canadian and Greenlandic hunters from the same bear population. It is a sensitive topic in many dimensions, a riddle for which I have no solution.

How much time do I spent to prepare for an unlikely event such as a fatal polar bear encounter? Could I not argue with ethics that were instilled into me when hiking in the back-country of Denali National Park (no guns there). Park rangers then told me that I enter bear habitat and should do so respectfully with minimal impact. They gave me useful pointers on how to lower contact and I saw no bears hiking for 4 days alone without a gun, but grizzlies eat berries while polar bears do not.

So, should I carry a gun, if I am not ready to kill a bear while working in bear country? I can accept the consequences of injury and death for myself, however, I cannot do so for those who are with me. Perhaps this then is a path to a solution: Discuss this with all who will be with me on the ice.

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Posted in Greenland, History, Oceanography, sea ice, Thule, Wild Life

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