Tag Archives: Greenland

Posted on February 17, 2013 by | 1 comment

I just came across these beautiful words and imagery of “A young lady venturing Far North”

The Fourth Continent's avatarThe Fourth Continent

According to Inuit culture in Greenland, a person possesses six or seven souls. The souls take the form of tiny people scattered throughout the body.

By Annie Dillard.

I don’t know much about this yet, but the idea of six or seven souls sounds almost overbearing. With just one soul, you can feel enough love, and in times of sorrow, too much pain. Just a thought.

I do love this carving of an Inuit Soul in the picture below. It has a fluidity to it. It is as if after rough waves had crashed onto the stone countless times, a soul had woken up from all the noise and pushed its face out for the world to see.

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Posted in Polar Exploration, Uncategorized

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Did I ever see a Polar Bear?

Posted on February 9, 2013 by | 3 comments

When people hear that I have worked as a physical oceanographer in the Arctic for almost 20 years, their first question is often: “Did you ever see a Polar Bear?” The answer is a yes, but when we see bears, it is usually as a tiny moving speck of yellowish white near the white, icy, and hazy horizon. Only twice was it different. The first time was in October 2003 to the north-west off Arctic Alaska when a young bear swam towards and around the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Healy doing station work:

Polar Bear seen Oct.-10, 2003 from aboard the USCGS Healy to the north-east of Alaska [Credit: Andreas Muenchow, University of Delawarel]

Polar Bear seen Oct.-10, 2003 from aboard the USCGC Healy to the north-east of Alaska [Credit: Andreas Muenchow, University of Delaware]

The second close encounter was last year as the Canadian Coast Guard Ship Henry Larsen was about to leave Nares Strait on Aug.-12. Out of the 100+ pictures snapped of this bear, the ship’s Steward Kirk McNeil of Labrador probably took the best shot:

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]

This bear approached the drifting ship leisurely over a 10 minutes period from a large piece of ice that also drifted with the tides and currents. My PhD student Pat Ryan captured the last 2 minutes of this visit with her iPhone. The voice is hers (I also discern the voice of Ice Specialist Erin Clarke). Greenland is in the background to the east:

ADDENDUM Feb.-13, 2013: I just found this map of the spatial distribution of polar bears from a Dec.-23, 2012 article in the Washington Post by Juliet Eilperin entitled “Polar bear trade, hunting spark controversy.” Writing for the Wall Street Journal Feb.9, 2013, Zac Unger commented with the question “Are polar bears really disappearing?”

Polar bear population and their trends. [Source: Polar Bear Specialist Group. Laris Karklis/The Washington Post. Published on December 23, 2012, 5:24 p.m.]

Polar bear population and their trends. [Source: Polar Bear Specialist Group. Laris Karklis/The Washington Post. Published on December 23, 2012, 5:24 p.m.]

Addendum Feb.-25, 2013: A very funny bear commercial.

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Posted in Ice Cover, Nares Strait 2012, Wild Life

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Petermann Glacier Ice Islands: Where are they now?

Posted on January 30, 2013 by | 5 comments

Two large calving events in 2010 and 2012 reduced the floating part of Petermann Gletscher by 44 km (28 miles) in length, 6 Manhattans (380 km^2) in area, and 42 gigatons in mass. But what’s a gigaton? Writing in The Atlantic Magazine, Julio Friedman states that if we put all people living on earth onto a scale, then we will get half a gigaton. So, Petermann’s two ice island weigh more than eighty times as all humanity combined. As a reminder, this is what the break-ups looked like:

Petermann Gletscher in 2003, 2010, and 2012 from MODIS Terra in rotated co-ordinate system with repeat NASA aircraft overflight tracks flown in 2002, 2003, 2007, and 2010. Thick black line across the glacier near y = -20 km is the grounding line location from Rignot and Steffen (2008).

Petermann Gletscher in 2003, 2010, and 2012 from MODIS Terra in rotated co-ordinate system with repeat NASA aircraft overflight tracks flown in 2002, 2003, 2007, and 2010. Thick black line across the glacier near y = -20 km is the grounding line location from Rignot and Steffen (2008).

It turns out that the smaller 2012 ice island is just as heavy as the 2010 island, because it is much thicker, about 200 m, 600 feet, or half the height of the Empire State Building in Manhattan. These thick and thin islands have since left Petermann Fjord and Nares Strait for more southern climes. The thinnest piece reached Newfoundland in the summer of 2011 where it melted away. Most of the thicker, larger, and heavier ice islands from Petermann and Ryder Glaciers now litter almost the entire eastern seaboard of Canada as the two largest pieces have split, broken, and splintered into many smaller pieces. Each of these still represents an exceptionally large and dangereous piece of ice that can wipe any offshore oil platform off its foundation. Luc Desjardins of the Canadian Ice Service now tracks more than 40 segments, some still bigger than Manhattan, some as small as a football field. The distribution along the 1500 km (1000 miles) of coast is staggering:

RadarSat imagery of eastern Baffin Island (bottom, right), western Greenland (top, right), and Nares Strait with Petermann Fjord (top, left) with pieces of Petermann and Ryder Ice Islands identified. [Credit: Luc Lesjardins, Canadian Ice Service]

RadarSat imagery of eastern Baffin Island (bottom, right), western Greenland (top, right), and Nares Strait with Petermann Fjord (top, left) with pieces of Petermann and Ryder Ice Islands identified as green dots. [Credit: Luc Lesjardins, Canadian Ice Service]

What stands out is that most pieces are close to the coast of Canada. This is expected, because often the ocean moves in ways to balance pressure gradient and Coriolis forces as we live on an earth that rotates once every day around its axis. This force balance holds both in the ocean and the atmosphere. We are all familiar with winds around a low-pressure system such as Hurricane Sandy where the winds move air counter-clockwise around the eye (the center of low pressure). This eye of low pressure in our ocean story is permanently near the center of Baffin Bay. Ocean currents then move water counter-clockwise around this eye. This results in a flow to the south off Canada and a flow to the north off Greenland. On a smaller scale this balance holds also, such as Delaware Bay or Petermann Fjord, but I will not bore you with the details of graduate level physics of fluids in motions … as important as they may be.

So, almost all the ice islands we see in the above imagery will make their way further south towards the Grand Banks off Newfoundland. Some are grounded to the bottom of the shallow coastal ocean and may sit in place for a year, or a month, or until the next high tide will lift the ice off the bottom and move it back into deeper water. Some ice islands will keep moving rapidly, some will further break apart, but none will go away anytime soon. If you want to see some of Petermann’s Ice Islands for yourself, take the ferry from North Sidney, Nova Scotia to Port aux Basques, Newfoundland and Labrador and head for the Great Northern Peninsula. That’s what I hope to do one of the next summers.

ResearchBlogging.org
Johnson, H., Münchow, A., Falkner, K., & Melling, H. (2011). Ocean circulation and properties in Petermann Fjord, Greenland Journal of Geophysical Research, 116 (C1) DOI: 10.1029/2010JC006519

Münchow, A., & Garvine, R. (1993). Dynamical properties of a buoyancy-driven coastal current Journal of Geophysical Research, 98 (C11) DOI: 10.1029/93JC02112

Rignot, E., & Steffen, K. (2008). Channelized bottom melting and stability of floating ice shelves Geophysical Research Letters, 35 (2) DOI: 10.1029/2007GL031765

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Posted in Ice Island, Petermann Glacier

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Shots of Airborne Lasers at Petermann Gletscher, Greenland

Posted on November 25, 2012 by | Leave a comment

If shots of whiskey make you dizzy, shots of laser stun. NASA stunned me this week, when I discovered that they provide millions such shots of Greenland from which to construct detailed images of the landscape. The shots are free, no age-limit. This is better than the usual remote sensing or photography of “just” brightness. The laser gives us height, and not just the perception of it by shadows and fake angles of illumination, but hard and direct measurements of, well, height above sea level. Have a look at several million such shots of Petermann Gletscher taken in 2010 before the glacier broke to Manhattan-sized pieces:

Petermann Glacier surface elevation from laser shots on Mar.-24, 2010 at the site where the Manhattan-sized ice island formed Aug.-6, 2010. The background shows the same scene at the same time at 250-m resolution from MODIS (see below). Colors along the 350-m wide laser track line show height above sea level in meters.

Petermann Glacier on March 24, 2010 as seen from MODIS satellite at 250-m resolution with two flight tracks along which laser data are collected. The black box shows the site of the figure above. The color figure on the right shows the slope or gradients of the data shown on left. It emphasizes regions where brightness changes fast. Multivariate calculus is useful!

We see two tracks: the one on right (east) has the ice stick more than 20-m above sea level (yellow colors) while about a mile to left (west) the ice’s surface elevation is only 10-m above sea level (light blue). Since the ice is floating and densities of ice and water are known, we can invert this height into an ice thickness. Independent radar measurements from the same track prove that this “hydrostatic” force balance holds, the glacier is indeed floating, so, multiply surface elevation by 10 and you got a good estimate of ice thickness. The dark blue colors of thin ice show meandering rivers and streams, ponds and undulations, as well as a rift or hairline fracture from east to west. This rift is visible both in the right and left track, it is the line along which the glacier will break to form the 2010 ice island. All ice towards the top of this rift has long left the glacier and some of it has hit Newfoundland as seen from the International Space Station by astronaut Ron Garan:

Last remnant of Petermann Ice Island 2010-A as seen from the International Space Station on Aug.-29, 2011 when it was about 3.5 km wide and 3 km long [Photo credit: Ron Garan, NASA]

Both are images of Petermann ice. The photo measures the brightness that hits the lens, but the laser measures both brightness and ice thickness. The laser acts like flash photography: When it is dark, we use a flash to provide the light to make the object “bright.” Now imagine that your camera also measures the time between the flash leaving your camera and brightness from a reflecting object to return it. What you think happens at an instant actually takes time as light travels fast, but not infinitely fast. So you need a very exact clock to measure the distance from your camera to the object. Replace the flash of the camera with a laser, replace the lens of your camera with a light detector and a timer, place the device on a plane, and you got yourself an airborne topographic altimeter. So, what use is there for this besides making pretty and geeky pictures?

The laser documents some of the change in “climate change.” Greenland’s glaciers and ice-sheets are retreating and shrinking. Measuring the surface and bottom of the ice over Greenland with lasers and radars gives ice thickness. The survey lines above were flown in 2002, 2003, 2007, 2010, and 2011. These data are a direct and accurate measure on how much ice is lost or gained at Petermann Gletscher and what is causing it. My bet is on the oceans which in Nares Strait and Petermann Fjord have increased the last 10 years to melt the floating glacier from below.

There is more, but Mia Zapata of the Gits sings hard of “Another Shot of Whiskey.” What a voice …

ResearchBlogging.org

Johnson, H., Münchow, A., Falkner, K., & Melling, H. (2011). Ocean circulation and properties in Petermann Fjord, Greenland Journal of Geophysical Research, 116 (C1) DOI: 10.1029/2010JC006519

Krabill, W., Abdalati, W., Frederick, E., Manizade, S., Martin, C., Sonntag, J., Swift, R., Thomas, R., & Yungel, J. (2002). Aircraft laser altimetry measurement of elevation changes of the greenland ice sheet: technique and accuracy assessment Journal of Geodynamics, 34 (3-4), 357-376 DOI: 10.1016/S0264-3707(02)00040-6

Münchow, A., Falkner, K., Melling, H., Rabe, B., & Johnson, H. (2011). Ocean Warming of Nares Strait Bottom Waters off Northwest Greenland, 2003–2009 Oceanography, 24 (3), 114-123 DOI: 10.5670/oceanog.2011.62

Thomas, R., Frederick, E., Krabill, W., Manizade, S., & Martin, C. (2009). Recent changes on Greenland outlet glaciers Journal of Glaciology, 55 (189), 147-162 DOI: 10.3189/002214309788608958

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Posted in Ice Island, Petermann Glacier, Polar Exploration

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Nares Strait Ice Arches and Petermann Ice Island 2012

Posted on November 13, 2012 by | 3 comments

Arching barriers of ice locked solidly to land are presently closing off Nares Strait for all ice leaving or entering this ocean passage from the Arctic to the North Atlantic Oceans. Gothic cathedrals have flying buttressing to hold them in place while ice arches have buttressing land that keeps them stable. The sea ice becomes land-fast until these ice arches collapse in June or early July. As the ocean under the ice is still moving, generally from north to south, one often finds very thin ice or even open water to the immediate south of these ice arches. Some of these temperature signals let us “see” large ice structures even in the dark of night which in Nares Strait lasts from early October to late March.

Surface temperature in degrees Celsius for Nares Strait on Nov.-10, 2012 from MODIS Terra. Thick ice is blue (cold) while thin ice is red (warm).

Surface temperature at the northern entrances to Nares Strait with the Arctic Ocean to the north.

Surface temperature at the southern entrance of Nares Strait with the North Atlantic Ocean to the south.

Southern entrance of Nares Strait as seen from RADARSAT showing ice arch formation in more spatial detail than MODIS temperatures do. Note the embedded ice island PII-2012 from Petermann Gletscher at the north-eastern edge of the ice arch. [Credit: Luc Desjardins, Canadian Ice Service]

These ice arches usually form in December or January, but this year they form a little earlier than usual. In some years such as 2006/07 or 2009/10 and 2010/11 they did not form at all and thick multi-year ice left the Arctic via a passage that is now closed. This leaves only Fram Strait to the east of Greenland for such export this year.

It appears that the large ice island that broke free from Petermann Gletscher earlier this year provides some stabilizing support to the southern ice arch as it is anchoring its north-eastern corner where it is possibly grounded. The depth of the ice island PII-2012-A1 is about 180 to 200 meters thick. I derived this estimate from both NASA’s Airborne Topographic Mapper (ATM) and the University of Kansas’s Radar Depth Sounder both flown concurrently on a DC-8 plane that surveyed Petermann Gletscher on May-7, 2011 with PII-2012-A1 still attached:

Profile of Petermann Glacier from laser (red) and radar (black) measurements on May-07, 2011. The 2012 break-up is indicated by a spike of the red under-ice topography near km-22. Bottom profiles from laser assume hydrostatic balance of floating ice.

The ATM is a scanning laser that measures the distance from the DC-8 to the surface within 0.2 meters (about 6-7 inches). If I know both the true sea level surface (I do, it’s called the geoid) and if the ice is floating undisturbed, then I can convert the surface elevation into a bottom draft. The red curve outlines the “theoretical” bottom of the glacier. This curve is masked by a thicker black curve that is a radar-derived image of the under-side of the glacier. Nothing theoretical about that one. These radar measurements agree closely with the red curves indicating an almost perfectly balanced floating glacier. This “balance” breaks down at two important points: (1) Near -20 km the glacier bottom is shallower than the red draft curve and it is here that the glacier sits on land as it is not floating. (2) Near +22 km we see a large red spike. This is the location of the 2012 break-up.

So, the 2012 ice-island that is anchoring the ice arch in southern Nares Strait is the piece of the glacier to the right of the red spike and with these data I can now conclude that PII-2012 was 11 km long, 15 km wide, and about 200 m deep. This Manhattan-sized ice-cube weights about 30 gigatons (10^12 kg), but “… that doesn’t mean much — who goes to the store and buys a gigaton of carrots? For a sense of perspective, a gigaton is about twice the mass of all people on earth …” [James Fallows writing for The Atlantic]. Hence this little ice-cube weights 50 times as much as do all people living on earth today. Incidentally, it is also the amount of CO2 that all humanity adds each year to the atmosphere. Coincidence.

Front of Petermann Glacier Aug.-11, 2012. View is from a small side-glacier towards the south-east across Petermann Fjord with Petermann Gletscher to the left (east). [Photo Credit: Erin Clark, Canadian Coast Guard Ship Henry Larsen]

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Posted in Ice Arch, Ice Cover, Petermann Glacier

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