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