By Rey Mourot
How going to the Greenland Ice Sheet to study glacier microbial communities, their impact, and their diversity … teaches us quite something about our own!
“Do we have everything ?”
The kitchen is full of stuff as I’m making sandwiches for the day on the ice sheet. Gluten-free bread and lactose-free spread cheese for Helen; this amazing vegan-feta thing for Katie, cheese and all the crappy food that fuels my motivation daily … thanks god Liane eats pretty much everything. Sandwiches packed, and here we go. Helicopter, ice sheet.
Helen, our GFZ postdoc. Fascinated by eukaryotic algae, she’s the “culturing” part of our team – although, as she says, she’s not able to keep a pet plant alive 😊
While they dig snow pits, the American Katie gently pokes on Helen’s British/Scottish accent and they try to imitate each other. I’m coring in silence, enjoying that my French accent is not brought up in the conversation. Liane is a few meters upwards from us, collecting air and snow samples; as a “European citizen” as she likes to say, her accent is from everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
Liane, GFZ Professor and the PI on this trip. Here to supervise, keep us alive and sample aerosols; although not necessarily in that order. Picture by Katie Sipes.
And as it should be, there’s no fieldwork in Greenland without Greenlanders – and our helicopter pilot Pilu, from Sermeq Helicopters, who has seen it all and way too cool to describe, completes our joyful team of small human-ants on the ice. In-between the jokes, our little fieldwork is going smoothly.
A view of our office on June 4th.
Although this year we are only dashing in and out of our field site, I remember our long camping fieldworks of the two past years as a founding experience when it comes to learning from others and about ourselves.
On the ice sheet, isolated from the world and our dear and otherwise ever-present web connections, we quickly get to know each other by sharing common scientific interests and goals, but also by building an everyday life together – cooking, cleaning, doing the dishes, securing the camp, informing one another about the new crevasses that can be spotted around, how to flush the most correctly our natural waste. Camp mood and closeness is important both for the productivity of our sampling and our survival; and we all quickly learn the needs and quirks of each of us that need to be fulfilled to keep each member of the team happy.
Our DP 2021 field camp after the mist suddenly
fell on it … speaking about extreme environments.
This one works in the evening but will be late at breakfast; this one’s mental health depends on a constant supply of hot chocolate, this one needs to snack regularly or their mood will suffer, this one need more access to the communications to the mainland at the moment, this one will take afternoon naps, this one gets cold faster. Although we are all self-preserving, it actually becomes part of the routine to check on each-other, especially in an extreme environment. After all, several studies indicates that mutualistic groups have a higher chance of survival than groups composed of individualistic members.
Katie, postdoc in bioinformatics, the Aarhus part of our team, swimming among the icebergs in the harbor – among many other crazy things she does daily.
We easily adapt to our important diversity by giving our members maybe not the exact same things; but rather, what they need so the team functions at best. I sometimes wonder why this kind of diversity just functions so well for us, but the fieldwork world is still barely able to make gears that are safe and practical to use for everybody, pants half the population wouldn’t need to put down to their knee by a shitty weather to pee, and just, in general, space for all that do not correspond to the dominant idea of the explorer.
In this bright month of June, far away from those considerations, our little four-people team is working to perfection; flowing smoothly between our differences of tastes, cultures and rhythms, as we learn to know each other’s qualities and quirks.
And, of course, the real stars of our fieldworks … these aggregates of cells and minerals trapped under the snow layer since September, and that we managed to reach to study them!
