Some insights into the struggles and joy of fieldwork in a camp on the ice

By Laura Halbach

Being back in Copenhagen, I feel happy about the regained comfort of modern civilisation: having a comfy mattress to sleep on, no distractions of a flapping tent wall mimicking the noise of bear paws scratching over the tent during the night and a warm and proper shower. While trying to get back into my normal work routine, I am using the opportunity to recap some of the exciting moments on the ice while the memories are still fresh and adding my perspective to the stories below.

The last weeks before Greenland: What a marathon!!

Sitting in the plane to Greenland gave me mixed feelings of excitement, exhaustion and relief. The last weeks before our departure was a marathon and my mind could barely relax, being constantly worried about weather I am forgetting anything. What about all the last minute orders I placed, will everything arrive? Did I mix up anything? Was 0.2 µm really the right pore size for analysis x? In the end, you have what you have on the ice. Knowing that the GFZ team brings their own science kit made me feel a bit more relaxed, since this will allow for some improvisation if something has been forgotten.

First week on the ice: Getting the science started

Arriving at the camp location makes me feel excited: I participated in a range of field work before, but often I could enjoy the comfort of a ship or at least a hut, but now we all would have to deal with living and working in tents. This means limited power supply and exposure to the weather (which turned out to be actually not as bad as I expected after Jason’s warnings about the heavy rainfall that is typical for this region). But that also means, having the possibility to observe the ice crust, the microbes and meltwater dynamics RIGHT OUTSIDE your tent. How cool is that?! Our first week was all about setting up the camp, the lab, our science gear and already spotting some good locations for potential sampling and experimental sites.

Observing cryoconites developing right outside my tent (top-left) and my beautiful bottle incubations (top-right) and me being happy that they worked out (bottom). Photos Laura Halbach

Second week: Science is running and daily routines are established

During the following days, the science took off (as did the algae bloom) and I started to take care of my first experiment: an in situ fertilisation of the glacial microbial community with different nutrients and minerals. I decided that fertilising two times a day would be best, as the nutrients may be quickly washed off. The gardening-like activity (it looked like I am watering imaginary plants) turned out to be a great and relaxing start of the day for me, being a non-morning person. The morning routine was complemented with some nice and creamy porridge and a big smile from Alex, who is always in a good mood and doesn’t mind spreading it. Thanks to Lasse, we ended up with two nice lab tents, each of them fitted with designated lab tables, which were sawed nicely matching the tent shapes.

Our ice camp at the beginning (left) with lots of snow cover and towards the end (right) with melted snow and some melt ponds and streams developing on the ice surface. Photos Laura Halbach

Third week: Science, science, science and wait… is this our last week ?!

During some days of A LOT of rain, I got reminded of how little fun camping in rain is. I try to see the positive side of it and remind myself that we might be lucky to the rain signal in our data sets. The slightly lowered mood in the camp during the days of rain, was contrasted by delicious food cooked in the kitchen tent during all evenings. I still remember that smell of the rich potato, cheese combination a la cuisine francaise by our young star chef Rey, that was just the perfect meal for that weather… So delicious! Somewhere in the middle of our expedition, I started to count our remaining days on the ice and realised that there was not thaaat much time left. The strong rain event showed me how easily all our science activities could be interrupted. Therefore, the next days with better weather would be the time to start the second experiment: again a fertilisation approach but this time under “ex situ” conditions in small glass bottles, which were left on the ice for 24 hours. The bottles were spiked with stable isotopes (C13 and N15) and additionally amended with a phosphorous solution and mineral mixes, the latter kindly provided and prepared by Liane and Rey. Thanks to the big support by Katharina Kitzinger from the Max-Planck-Institute in Germany, the experiment will give new insights into the productivity and nutrient uptake by the whole community, as well as on a single cell level. But since the Greenlandic weather gods don’t seem to like me ending experiments, just as last year, the final sample analysis and filtration work got interrupted by a storm approaching the camp site. Securing the camp site had first priority and we had to take down one of our lab tents, move the other lab tent and secure the whole camp site. Me, trying to be happy that we are not leaving the camp site already on that day (-> = processing ALL samples in the hotel), then rushed through a series of last sample processing and filtration work, trying to use every last hour that was left during our last two days for science. This involved long nights (not too long, since I get far too easily scared by sitting alone in the dark in a tent and again, hearing the noise of potential bear paws outside), early mornings and the support by the whole team, and particularly the big help by Alex and Rey.

Video of the beginning of the storm.

 

This could have been one of the last pictures taken of Alex: it was the night of the big storm and the night when Alex was almost blown off the ice sheet in his tent (see his video further down), luckily Lasse our hero could save him during the night. Photo Laura Halbach

One of my favourite pictures: showing Alex, in the back, Eva and Rey filtering and sitting at the table and Liane microscoping on the floor, since this was the very last spot available in the tent. The night before, we had to take down the other lab tent, so all lab activities had to be merged together on very little space. Luckily, everyone is easy-going and Liane and Alex, don’t mind improvising. Photo Laura Halbach

Great lab processing team :) Photo Laura Halbach

It took us until the very last day, until all science gear was stored away safely into boxes, locked by several layers of duct tape, that we, finally, took the time to go out for a walk and explore our glacier more. This last evening on the ice was rewarded with an exceptionally beautiful sunset.

I am very proud on what we have achieved, the great team effort that made all of this possible and I can’t wait to see what will come out of the experiments!

Liane and Rey happy (left), ESR's Team (right). Photo Laura Halbach

Last evening on the ice. Photo Laura Halbach

Great team! Photo Laura Halbach

Snow to ice transitions

By Liane G. Benning

 

Despite a few days of sleep and lying low, I don’t know how to properly recover from this marvellous and, compared to many international colleagues, unique opportunity that we were awarded. Against all odds and with preparations and shipments that could have been for nothing, in the end the team made it onto the ice and we managed to carry out a glorious (and at times harder than expected) 3-week field season in the summer of 2020 in Greenland. 

 

This success was an enormous team effort and as Martyn and Alex already mentioned it is all down to the 3 young ESR’s (Eva, Laura and Rey) and to Lasse (our camp manager and all round fixer par excellence) as well as the help of the local pilot crew around Pilu from www.sermeqhelicopters.gl that it all worked out in the end.

 

We are all safely back now. Our travel to Greenland was preceded by an individual pre-departure Covid1 SARS CoV-2 test, if required the 5-day Greenland quarantine and an antibody test on the ice (thanks Alex). While on ice and away from ‘the world’, we felt safe and that the ‘real’ world was far away and COVID19 became almost irrelevant; viruses were only a part of the microbiome that we studied and only an issue in our snow and ice samples and not in/on us. 

 

We had a fabulous – yet at times tough time - strong winds and way, way more rain than we wanted is just one part of the story. We managed to do fabulous science, perform complex experiments, do in situ measurements and collect snow-ice core transitions – all stories that the ERS’s will tell in their own time. We had a well working camp with great food and high spirits even in the most dismal times and a team that I would not exchange for anything. Thanks all !

 

For me scientifically it was also a perfect start and snow-ice darkening transition season. Based on our work at S6 during Black and Bloom, I was almost ready to maybe accept that snow algae are less of a player in the Greenland darkening game. Alas, this season restored my faith in snow algae and their crucial role in the melt enhancing and albedo lowering processed on Greenland. We caught an ideal snowy start (crevasses notwithstanding), with plenty of red snow algae patches all over our camp and work area; with time, melt proceeded as expected and with the rain and strong winds some of these red snow algae patches melted away and transitioned, over the 3 weeks, into dark, ice-algae dominated surfaces; yet some red snow algae fields still persisting until the end. We also saw during our dash to QAS-U that red snow fields were everywhere; even Pilu, our helicopter pilot said he sees them all the time when he flies over the ice sheet. We even saw them at depth (but that is another story); thus, my beloved snow algae are still in the game; phew….

Flying over the dark ice of South Greenland reveals how albedo changes fast during melting

These snow-ice transition processes that we closely observed and lived through this summer were part of our Deep Purple hypothesis, yet they turned out to be way more fascinating than we all assumed. Melting, enhanced and highly affected by rain and wind, gave us even more insights into what we don’t know and how we need to proceed if we want to disentangle the mechanisms and roles of the individual components in this complex, ever changing system; this field season also showed us a likely scenario of ‘what is to come’ in many other areas in Greenland and the Arctic. It showed us how little we understand these fast changing supraglacial systems, where darkening is not just unavoidable but governed by a very complex, highly logical and tight interplay between physics (hydrology) biology (microbes) and chemistry (minerals and soot) that we still have to decipher.  

 

Living on ice and doing science on ice has led to many funny stories and the videos and photos are plentiful and these will emerge slowly in subsequent blogs. Below just a smidgen of those I took.

The top of the ice core is full of dark material that consists of minerals and many many ice algae that change the watering crust

Blue ice coring with a blue ice corer ;-)

A happy filtration tent (note expert tables made by Lasse Deng) and with Laura Hallbach, Alex Anesio, Eva Doting and Rey Mourot all stressing our solar array with many pumps running simultaneously 

Back and Happy

By Alexandre Anesio

After almost three weeks camped on the ice without any internet and completely detached of the world, we are now all back home to Denmark, Germany and the UK. Samples are safe in our laboratories at a variety of temperatures from -80 to +4 degrees C for a range of chemical and microbiological analyses. I still can hardly believe that we could mobilize such paraphernalia for fieldwork on the Greenland ice sheet in times of COVID-19. An extremely efficient logistics manager (thank you so much Lasse Twiggs Degn), flexible and welcoming local community and very strong minded and willing PhD students, postdocs and PIs made this possible. No regrets. I have learned a lot of new things about the life cycle of glacial algae, compared to previous years. A combination of good timing and weather conditions allowed us to have arrived just at the snow transition to bare ice. This provided the opportunity to collect a bunch of ice cores that shows where glacier algae lie during the winter, the impact of hydrological processes, such as snowmelt and rain on the distribution of glacier algae and how glacier algae colonize white surfaces to darken the ice during the summer season.

  

The dark spots in this ice surface are almost entirely composed by ice algae and translucent minerals. By scrapping the surface into a small pile of ice, one can clearly see the pink-purple coloration of the ice that contributes to the melt of the Greenland ice sheet. Photo Alex Anesio

The PhD students (Eva Doting, Laura Halbach, Rey Mourot) and logistics manager (Lasse Twiggs Degn) did such a brilliant job through the fieldwork and got everything they came for. Photo Eva Doting

PI Martyn Tranter was “wood for every construction” (to use a Brazilian expression, meaning that he was in high demand). His albedo and ablation pole measurements were in high demand by all the PhD students. Photo Eva Doting

PI Liane Benning under high wind conditions, preparing to collect a box of surface ice. Photo Eva Doting

Crevasses and polar bears are overrated. Wind turned out to be, at least for me, a much bigger nuisance. This is a video from inside Alex’s tent…

I have learned a lot scientifically, but I am also delighted that I have learned so much from my colleagues during long conversations in the field. Here is what I learned:

• The film Titanic is classified as a romantic comedy by one of the PhD students.
• The sound description of drinking a pint of beer is “puff, puff, puff”, which is quite impressive since I would need at least 20 puffs to get through a pint.
• I have learned new expressions in Danish. Der er ingen ko på isen (no cow on the ice) means ”no problems” and I thought it was pretty appropriate considering where we were. However, my wife, who is Swedish, claims that the Danes copied the expression from the Swedes….
• I could not have guessed this, but some people think football is boring.
• If you are hungry in an ice camp, even super overcooked macaroni with a half-heated tuna in water can actually be tasty.
• Cucumbers are the fourth state of water. Ok, this is my own….

Beyond the great companionship and exciting science during these 3 weeks, I have also been constantly reminded how beautiful the Greenland ice sheet is and the feeling to be surrounded by ice and amazing skies.

Photo Alex Anesio

First field season completed – blooming algae everywhere

by Martyn Tranter

We left the field on Sunday (19th July), began preparing our equipment and samples for return immediately, and Alex, Laura and I returned to Denmark with samples in cryo-shippers and ice boxes yesterday (Tuesday, 21st). I am writing this short piece in the comfort of a hotel room at Copenhagen Airport. Eva, Lasse, Liane and Rey are finishing the packing in Qaqortoq today, and will return tomorrow. We’ve had a pretty intense four weeks, and we all need some time to recharge, but it was well worth the hardships, as I hope the following sample shows.

Alex, Eva, Laura, Lasse and Jason Box (from GEUS) literally got off the plane in Narsarsuaq on June 30th, walked into the Sermeq helicopter and were at our field site within an hour of landing. They effectively quarantined for COVID on the ice. Liane, Rey and I tested negative again before we left. We set up camp near the PROMICE (https://www.promice.dk/home.html) KAS M site.

Our camp site, near to the PROMICE QAS M weather station (which is ~200 m to the right out of sight). 

I honestly thought that the southern tip of Greenland would be as warm as it could get for summer fieldwork on the ice sheet, but Jason had warned that you get a full house of variable weather most weeks. We experienced the “balmy south” for a couple of days only – beautiful weather, bright blue skies and no need for an outer jacket.

Eva and Liane dining al fresco in the (rare) warm evening sun.

Otherwise, we had camped in a cold summer with plenty of rain and lots of wind. Fortunately for Jason, he left after a few days, having installed a rain gauge on a nunataq near by. This seemed to provoke the glacier gods into an attempt to wash it away with a downpour or too. We’ll certainly know if the automatic rain recording works, and the data will be invaluable in our understanding of how the darkening ice surface evolved. The practical consequences of being wet while camping on ice are a pain. You’re cold, in takes a long time to warm up, and drying your wet things inside cold tents takes a long time. The dank smell lingers on your clothing too.

It’s hard to capture cold, wind and rain in a photo, but you get a good impression of us being cold and tired from this photo. Liane, Alex, Laura and Lasse are, what Aussies call, pooped.

Did the glacier algae care about the cold, wet and windy weather? Not a bit. They were everywhere, happily multiplying and colonising new surfaces.

A shot from a helicopter ride out of camp mid-season towards the snowline. The ice surface is black almost as the snow melts.

The black circle is a 52mm lens cap, but the clumps of black and black covering to the ice crystals are largely glacier algae. They thrived everywhere there was melt.

One of my favourite microbiologists, Alex, always happy when he’s looking at glacier algae through his microscope. 

Our three Ph.D. students, Eva, Laura and Rey worked flat out and around the clock to compensate for time lost due to rain and high winds, Alex and Liane ensured that the lab tents were functioning as best they could, and did great jobs sampling and filtering, and Lasse became our key man in building and maintaining a functional camp, keeping our personal tents safe, and patrolling all hours of the night to ensure that we didn’t blow away in the storms. We all were well down on good quality sleep, but Lasse was more machine than human during the worse of the winds. We would have pulled off the ice early had it not been for his skill and calm in keeping us safe. 

Rey about to retrieve his first ice core from under a 1.5m deep snowpack. We are going to learn how glacier algae “hibernate” over the winter. Microbiologists will hate this turn of phrase for sure.

Laura’s incubations basking in the sunlight.

Laura looking a lot happier in the warm of the science tent.

Liane ensuring that the science tent was productive. Rey demonstrating that gloves need to be worn at all times when processing microbial samples. 

The last week on fieldwork was something of a frenzy, with lost time being made up at the expense of sleep and breaks. Lasse did a sterling job working around us to ensure that all was packed up as early as possible, ready for the helicopter decamp.

A sample of packed up camp and trash, ready for return to Qaqortoq by helicopter. 

Eva watching Lasse deal with the first sling load out of camp.

Lasse, more machine than man, after a great three weeks of keeping our bodies, souls and the camp together.

My final thanks go to Pilu Nielsen of Sermeq Helicopters (https://www.sermeqhelicopters.gl/). He could not have been more helpful, flexible and professional, and is ultra-knowledgeable about local conditions, ad who to get hold of to do what. Expeditions and holiday makers, he is top drawer and gets my unreserved recommendation. 

There will be other field and science blogs to follow. The bottom line is that we learnt tons, and that we have a load of exciting samples to process. We’ll keep you posted on our progress.