Preparations and Installations

Posted on August 9, 2015 by | Leave a comment

Guest Blogger:  Pat Ryan, graduate student

Field research can be described as exciting, challenging and demanding. The work, especially when undertaken in the Arctic, has proven to be all of these to me. Planning ahead is an important part of the task. Since we are so far removed from things like high speed internet connections and hardware stores, we try to be as prepared as possible with redundant equipment, any computer data file and programs we  anticipate that we might need, a set of backup plans for foreseeable contingencies and a toolbox full of gizmos and gadgets which might come in handy to solve the inevitable complications that will arise. It seems to me that the most important skills for an Arctic researcher are perseverance, an inclination to be very creative and a good sense of humor.  The scenery, however, can be breathtaking.

Belgrave Glacier

Belgrave Glacier

This summer, I’m the stay-at-home scientist. Whilst my advisor Andreas and my fellow graduate student Peter are working in Petermann Fjord, I’m home and am attempting to help as much as I can from here. This assistance has included installing a satellite communication system here and testing these systems that we’ll be using to transmit data about ocean conditions under a glacier and atmospheric conditions above it to us in Delaware for as long as we can.

In accomplishing this project, the phrase, “it takes a village” comes to mind. Weeks ago, David Huntley of the Delaware Environmental Observing System (DEOS) at the University of Delaware configured the meteorologic station that will be the communications hub for all our data. He also trained us on installation.  This hardware was packed up and transported to a ship, the Oden, in Sweden to be carried aboard for this summer’s research cruise to Petermann Fjord.   Last week, on the Oden in the Arctic, Andreas configured the data gathering and transmission equipment, utilizing creative wiring techniques to allow regular transmission of data via satellite communications systems.  Unfortunately there are no cell towers here either so satellite phones are being used to send the data.  At home, I installed hardware to receive the data.  Throughout this process,  Kevin Brinson, Director of DEOS, used his experience to provide consultation and guidance on all of this, including acting as a liaison with high-tech equipment manufacturers. After several days of work to implement this near-real-time monitoring system to measure conditions and transmit those measurements within hours of their capture, we have a working system!

The exhilaration we all felt upon the first successful connection and seeing information like the ambient temperature and barometric pressure at Petermann Fjord (measured less than an hour before I got it) made all that work worthwhile. Upon installation of the monitoring station on the surface of the glacier and drilling through the ice to place ocean measurement instruments, we should have a system that can give us this and much more information for an extended deployment – perhaps several years – and return that data every day.  The last time we installed this kind of ocean monitoring instruments, they measured for 3 years and required us to to return via ship to recover the instruments before we got any data.

How long these instruments will collect data is dependent on a number of factors. Conditions in the Arctic can be rather rough on electronics. Temperatures dip below -40 degrees (either Celsius or Fahrenheit) and polar bears are very inquisitive creatures – wires seem to attract their curiosity.   The ice upon which our equipment will rest has been melting. Eventually, this glacier will calve and the location of our monitoring station is likely to be impacted by melting and/or calving (or breaking off) of the glacier.   Our equipment is battery powered with solar charging supplements when there is sunlight. We hope that our batteries will be able to give us data throughout the long Arctic night that will last for months until sunrise (when solar charging begins again) in the spring.

Meterologic station aboard the Oden.

Meterologic station aboard the Oden.

Meterologic station aboard the ship. The ice of Greenland in the background.

Meterologic station aboard the ship. The ice of Greenland in the background.

Tomorrow, Andreas and Peter will be venturing out to the ice in the first steps of installing all this hardware. We are very excited about the prospect of seeing the results of many months worth of planning and work.  As the project continues Andreas and Peter will keep us up to date on their progress.

Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

GPS, Geocaching, and Greenland Glaciers

Posted on July 29, 2015 by | 1 comment

Navigating ice, ocean, and land, brave women and men have always used the stars for guidance. Just think of the three kings who followed a star to witness the birth of Jesus Christ in Bethlehem 2015 years ago. They were 6 days late. Keeping track of time track was always difficult for navigating, especially at sea and the British Navy lost many ships as a result of poor time keeping. There are books written on the history of determining longitude, the best of which is called, well, “Longitude.” Now why would I ponder these questions and histories two hours before I am boarding the Swedish icebreaker Oden to travel by sea and ice to Petermann Glacier?

The Global Position System (GPS) that many of us have in our smart phones or tiny hand-held devices makes navigating easy. Both measure time as our civilization has put “stars” into space that guide hikers out in the back-country, urban dwellers to the next bar or restaurant, and missiles into a target the size of the dot over the letter “i” on a license plate of a car. Few know that the GPS satellites only sent time from an atomic clock to our GPS receivers and smart phones. Time is of the essence, there is something almost spiritual about time and how to define it. And time is linked to space not just because of Einstein’s theory of relativity, but also the way we measure space by measuring the time that waves travel through space.

Waiting for the plane to get 58 scientists to Thule to board the I/B Oden, I went for a geocaching trip an hour or two from the town of Kangerlussuaq. My wife got me into this 2 years ago as a way to explore areas via hiking without much planning. All we do is enter some GPS position of places where other people have placed “treasures” and we head out to find them. These geocaches are everywhere: within 100 feet of my home, in every city I went to in Poland, Sweden, or Germany, and now Greenland, too. My favorite GPS unit is a little hand-held $99 Garmin eTrex 10. It does a marvelous job to get me anywhere within about 3-6 feet (1-2 meters).

As part of our Petermann research, we also got four “fancy” GPS systems which we want to place on the ice shelf of Petermann Gletscher to measure tidal motions. The water under the glacier is connected to ocean that moves the Empire-State-Building thick ice up and down every 12 hours or so. We do not know by how much, though, and when it moves up and when it moves down. There should also be daily cycles and longer periods caused by winds and waves. Now these fancy $25,000 GPS are able to track over 400 satellites (not just the 9 that my Garmin does) and they receive the time information in a very raw and accurate format at more than one radio frequency in more than one way. If one has several of these, we got four, then it is possible to built a network that reduces common errors in position to a few millimeters in the horizontal, and 1-2 centimeter in the vertical after some smart processing. So these “fancy GPS” can sense the difference of the top of your smart phone from the bottom, and I do not mean its length or width, but its thin height. And this is blowing my mind. We need this accuracy to measure tides, and tides we will measure for the 20-30 days that we are working in and around Petermann Gletscher.

Wish us luck as we are heading from the green part of Greenland in the south to its white (ice), black (ocean), and gray (land) parts. There are few colors where we will be the next 4 weeks. Our internet will be gone, but I will try to send text files and small photos until we return on 4 September or so, but time will be hard to find. Wish all of us luck …

1 Comment

Posted in Greenland, History, Petermann Glacier, Petermann2015

Tagged , , , , , , , ,

Preparing for Petermann One Day At a Time

Posted on July 23, 2015 by | Leave a comment

Glaciers, Greenland, Adventure, Expedition, Ice, Polar Bears, Narwhales, oh the fun to go to Greenland.

Swedish icebreaker I/B Oden 22 July 2015 on its way to Thule. [Photo Credit: https://twitter.com/SjoV_isbrytning]

Swedish icebreaker I/B Oden 22 July 2015 on its way to Thule. [Photo Credit: https://twitter.com/SjoV_isbrytning%5D


This romantic notion is false and pretty pictures always lie. To prove my point, I just list what one scientist does 4 days before shipping out to Greenland for 5 weeks. [My wife left last week to visit our grown son in California. She knows the drill, focus, and strain that does not make good company. We have gone through such 4-8 weeks of separation many times during our 20+ years of marriage; her leaving a week before I do works rather well for us]:

04:45 Wake up
05:00 Check e-mail on iPhone in bed
05:05 Read Twitter feed: Canadian research ship diverted to break ice in Hudson Bay
05:10 Check references to outreach-related news
05:15 Read Wilson Quarterly article “The Race to the Arctic” on Arctic developments with global policy impacts
05:30 Shower and Dress
05:45 Check Iridium data collection to Oden, fix minor problem
06:00 Check Hans Island weather, winds still from the north at 10 kts
06:15 Clean up mess cat made, make coffee
06:30 Check latest satellite imagery on Nares Strait, beautiful Arctic lead (upwelling) and sediment plumes from streams and glaciers
07:00 Bicycling to work
07:15 Brief hallway meeting with new grant specialist
07:30 Checking news on Arctic Sea Ice Forums
07:35 Downloading and reading peer-reviewed papers for proposal writing
08:00 Distracted by Tamino’s post about Five signs of denial regarding climate change
08:00 NSF Proposal writing
08:30 Distracted, responding to international e-mails
09:00 Passing links and photos for future press release

My littered office with 2 (of 10) drums of cable to connect ocean sensors through 300 m thick ice to Iridium satellite phone at the surface.

My littered office with 2 (of 10) drums of cable to connect ocean sensors through 300 m thick ice to Iridium satellite phone at the surface.

I am falling behind and feel the tension to get this NSF proposal finished by saturday. NSF stands for National Science Foundation, the proposal is asking for $500,000 to conduct a 3-year experiment with German and Norwegian scientists in the summers of 2016 and 2017. If successful, it will support two graduate students full time for two (MS) and three (PhD) years as well as two technicians for five months total. Peer-review of these proposals is brutal with perhaps a 1:7 success rate on average.

09:15 NSF proposal writing
09:40 Respond to former collaborator on an underwater acoustic communication project
09:45 Back to NSF proposal writing
10:00 Studying Sutherland and Cenedese (2009) on dynamics of the East Greenland Current interacting with canyons as explored by laboratory study
10:30 Converting Latex files to .pdf for uploads to NSF server
11:00 Read and edit UDel Press Release
11:15 Giving university administrators full access to current version of NSF proposal after uploading files to NSF servers
11:20 Heading to coffee shop for short bicycle break
12:00 UNAVCO gear arrived at office
12:05 Re-design the mechanics of the surface mount of the automated weather station to be deployed on Petermann Glacier

UNAVCO GPS systems for deployment on Petermann Gletscher.

12:45 Checking ice and weather in Nares Strait, Arctic Forecast
13:00 Back to proposal, writing/thinking about buoyant coastal currents interacting with canyons
16:00 Meet with PhD student on physics of GPS
16:15 Back to proposal writing
17:30 Graphical layout of proposal
18:15 Bicycle to Main Street for steak + margarita dinner
19:30 Home; set-up overdue MODIS processing
19:45 Edit this list, add links, and photos
19:55 Check Nares Strait weather and DMI Greenland ice
20:15 Daily Iridium data download from Oden works (equipment testing)


20:30 Posting this post
20:45 Editing and updating this post
21:00 Finished processing and posting on my web serverNares Strait MODIS imagery for the week

Leave a comment

Posted in Petermann2015, Wild Life

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Petermann Glacier Tidal Heaving

Posted on July 20, 2015 by | 1 comment

Some glaciers float on the ocean around Antarctica and Greenland. Petermann Gletscher in North Greenland is one of these. It spawned massive Manhattan-sized ice islands in 2010 and 2012. Could tides influence when and where such break-ups occur? After all, the tides under the floating glacier move the ice up and down. But how does a 50 km long, 15 km wide, and 300 m thick floating glacier pivots about its “hinge?” Does it do so like a rigid plate of steel or does it bend and buckle like jelly? I do not know, because nobody has measured the tidal motions of Petermann’s floating ice. So, one of many projects this summer will be to measure tides on Petermann with fancy GPS systems.

Shape of the floating part of Petermann Gletscher (right panel) drom laser altimeters along two tracks flown along the glacier in 2014 (left panel).

Shape of the floating portion of Petermann Gletscher from laser altimeters (right panel) along two tracks flown along the glacier in May of 2014 (left panel).

Martin Jakobsson of Stockholm University posed these questions, sort of, when he asked us American oceanographers, if we had any fancy GPS units to work with one he plans to put high on a cliff overlooking Petermann Fjord. He needs exact positions to map the bottom of the ocean. The cliff-GPS station is fixed while he moves about in a small boat that also has a GPS. Taking the difference of the raw travel times received by the cliff-GPS and the boat-GPS, he can reduce GPS position errors from several meters to several centimeters. People call this differential GPS and he wondered if we oceanographers had any use of it to perhaps give him the tidal corrections he also needs as the measures bottom depths from a boat. Well, this was not initially part of our plan and we did not get funded to study the glacier or the tides under it, but his question got me thinking while Alan Mix of Oregon State University did some organizing. One always squeezes extra science into such great opportunities. Discoveries lurk everywhere to inquiring minds.

Small survey boat loaded onto I/B Oden in Landskrona, Sweden, June 2015.

Small survey boat loaded onto I/B Oden in Landskrona, Sweden, June 2015.

Alan managed to find not one, not two, but three fancy GPS units from an organization that I had never heart of. It is called UNAVCO:

UNAVCO, a non-profit university-governed consortium, facilitates geoscience research and education using geodesy. We challenge ourselves to transform human understanding of the changing Earth by enabling the integration of innovative technologies, open geodetic observations, and research, from pole to pole.

“Geodetic observations” are measurements of locations on the earth’s surface. In the old days surveyors walked about with sextant, clocks, tripods, and optical devices to fix a location and reference it to another. Nowadays satellites and lasers do this faster, but I digress. Suffice it to say, UNAVCO is giving us 3 fancy GPS system to carry with us to Petermann Gletscher to make measurements of tides on the ice. So we can pick 3 locations on the ice where we leave these GPS for the 3-4 weeks next month. I have never done this before, so there will be lots of new learning.

Navigation during early Arctic exploration. Photo taken during a visit of the Peary MacMillan Arctic Museeum at Bowdoin University in Brunswick, Maine.

Navigation during early Arctic exploration. Photo taken during a visit of the Peary MacMillan Arctic Museeum at Bowdoin University in Brunswick, Maine.

I have worked with tides since plunging my head into tidal mud-flats of north-west Germany where I grew up and camping on the shores of the Conwy Estuary in North-Wales where I collected data for my MS thesis. Below I show a 4 week record from three locations in Nares Strait where the tidal elevations range from more than 4 meters at the southern entrance to less than 2 meters in Hall Basin next to Petermann Fjord. The data are from bottom pressure sensors that were deployed for 3-9 years, but I here only want to show the spring-neap cycle. So we already have some idea on how the tides in the ocean next to Petermann Glacier behave.

Sea level fluctuations in meters for 28 days at Discovery Harbor or Fort Conger, Canada near 81.7 N latitude (top), Alexandra Fjord, Canada near 78.9 N latitude (middle), and Foulke Fjord, Greenland near 78.3 N latitude (bottom).

Sea level fluctuations in meters for 28 days at Discovery Harbor or Fort Conger, Canada near 81.7 N latitude (top), Alexandra Fjord, Canada near 78.9 N latiude (middle), and Foulke Fjord, Greenland near 78.3 N latitude (bottom).

Models of tides in Nares Straits do really well if, and only if, the bottom topography is known. And this is where Martin’s mapping of the ocean floor in Petermann Fjord and our tidal observations on the floating glacier come together: We both need good bottom topography, we both use fancy GPS, and we both need to know tides to get accurate bottom depths and we need to know bottom depths to predict tides.

1 Comment

Posted in Greenland, Oceanography, Petermann Glacier, Petermann2015

Tagged , , , , , ,

Oceanography of Nares Strait Ice Flushing

Posted on July 13, 2015 by | 4 comments

I need the ice out of Nares Strait, a 20 mile wide and 300 miles long pathway to the North Pole between northern Canada and Greenland. The ice blocks our way to Petermann Fjord where a large glacier pushes thick ice out so sea as a floating ice shelf. We plan to drill through the floating section of the glacier that is about as thick as the Empire State Building is high. The ship to get us there is the Swedish icebreaker Oden (Location Map). She is passing the Faroe Islands to the north-west of Scotland and will arrive in 2 weeks at Thule Air Force Base where we will meet her.

Image of northern Greenland (top right) and Ellesmere Island (center) showing open water as black, land as gray, and sea ice as gray/white. The two red dots are Thule Air Force Base in the south and Petermann Glacier in the north. Note the bands of black water along the coast of Ellesmere Island that result from east to west blowing winds that move ice offshore.

Image of northern Greenland (top right) and Ellesmere Island (center) showing open water as black, land as gray, and sea ice as gray/white. The two red dots are Thule Air Force Base in the south and Petermann Glacier in the north. Note the bands of black water along the coast of Ellesmere Island that result from east to west blowing winds that move ice offshore and reduce the southward flow in Nares Strait.

The voyage from Thule to Petermann usually takes about 2-3 days, but if the sea ice does not flush out with the generally southward currents, then it may take a week or two wrecking havoc to our busy science schedule. So, why is the ice still lingering in Nares Strait this year?

Nares Strait ice cover in July of 2015 (left), 2014 (center), and 2013 (right) from MODIS Terra.

Nares Strait ice cover in July of 2015 (left), 2014 (center), and 2013 (right) from MODIS Terra.

There are three parts to the answer: First, a sturdy ice arch at the southern entrance of Nares Strait has to break. It has done so only last week. Second, a strong and perhaps oscillating flow has to thoroughly collapse the large pieces of ice at a narrow choke point that is Smith Sound. This has not happened yet. And third, a persistent flow to the south has to flush out ice into Baffin Bay to the south faster than it enters from the Arctic Ocean in the north. This flow is much weaker at the moment than is normal, because winds in the Arctic Ocean have been from east to west right now. These winds moved water (and ice) offshore to the north, so sealevel along northern Greenland and Canada drops. We can see this in today’s satellite imagery as prominent black bands of open water along the coast of northern Canada.

Lets take a closer look of this same image and zoom in on the southern part of Nares Strait as it looked this morning.

Collapsing ice arch at the southern entrance to Nares Strait on 13 July 2015 from MODIS AQUA.

Collapsing ice arch at the southern entrance to Nares Strait on 13 July 2015 from MODIS AQUA.

What used to be a solid frozen mass of ice along the Greenland coast (bottom right) has become a broken and loose mass of smaller ice floes. The larger blocks farther from the coast are now sliding southward as the loose ice along the coast reduces friction or lubricates the edges. The sides lose their grip on the ice and the entire construction fails and collapses. A most beautiful video on the stability of arches is posted by Open University here about lines of action or thrust.

All we now need for the ice to flush out of Nares Strait is a weakening or reversal of the winds at the other northern entrances to Nares Strait. Much of the generally southward flow is caused by the ocean’s surface being higher in the north than it is in the south. There are details that I am skipping, but basically much of the flow rolls downhill like a ball. And with the winds up north being from east to west, there is not much of a hill that the water can flow down, so we got somewhat stagnant waters. I have actually measured the height of this “hill of water” many times over the many years with ocean sensors that measure how much water is above them. This figure summarizes 3 years of data collected every 3 hours or so

Graph showing how water flow (called “volume flux”) varies with the steepness of the hill (called “pressure gradient”). The “hill” is at most 10 centimeters or 3 inches) high. [Adapted from Muenchow, 2015]

Now there is more to the “hill” story that is modified near the surface by the earth’s rotation in a fluid that has different densities at different depths. In a nutshell, the surface flow is 2-3 times as strong as the depth averaged flow. Furthermore, the surface flow on the Canadian side of Nares Strait is often twice as strong as that closer to Greenland, but all these spatial variations in flow actually help to smash large pieces of ice by moving and rotating them different sides of the same large piece of ice differently.

So, lets all hope that we get a few days of strong winds from the north flowing south, that should clear Nares Strait quickly before Oden arrives there in 2 weeks time. Those winds from the north not only flush out ice from Nares Strait, they also keep it nicely on one, the Canadian side. Earth rotation does wonderful and magical things to fluids such as water and air.

Muenchow, A, 2015: Volume and freshwater flux observations from Nares Strait to the west of Greenland at daily time scales from 2003 to 2009. J. Phys. Oceanogr., re-submitted July 2015, .pdf

4 Comments

Posted in Greenland, Ice Arch, Ice Cover, Oceanography

Tagged , , , , ,