DEEP PURPLE postdoc Katie Sipes has written a blog post for the Cryospheric Sciences (CR) Division of the European Geosciences Union (EGU), reflecting on the 2023 DEEP PURPLE fieldwork in Greenland:
https://blogs.egu.eu/divisions/cr/2023/09/15/looking-for-the-window-during-fieldwork/
DEEP PURPLE PhD student Elisa Peter has written a blog post for the European Association of Geochemistry, reporting back on her experience attending the EMBO Practical Course on Metabolomics Bioinformatics for Life Scientists in Wageningen, the Netherlands:
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.
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.
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.
Our DP 2021 field camp after the mist suddenly
fell on it … speaking about extreme environments.
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!
Snow isn’t exactly welcome on this Arctic expedition.
Last week, Martyn Tranter, Ate Jaarsma, Shunan Feng, and Lasse Twiggs Degn set off on their summer fieldwork – the first of 20 who will make the journey this season. Traveling up to the north of Greenland with a portable research base is no mean feat – they must transfer 10 tons of equipment by barge, and helicopter to set up camp on the ice. It’s not just laboratory facilities either - sleeping quarters, toilets, a kitchen, and power sources need to be in place to support the altogether two-month long stay on the ice.
But setting up camp in the wrong place could be disastrous. Snow in this case can dangerously conceal deep crevasses in the ice, which can quickly grow with glacier movement. Finding snow on arrival means that the team have been on standby in Ilulissat for a few days, and are in good spirits while they wait for an improvement in conditions so they can set up camp safely. If this drone footage captured by Shunan Feng is anything to go by, then at least it’s not a bad place to wait!
Once the camp is established, the group will start their investigations, collecting data and studying the biology and chemistry of the glacier surface, and how this can affect the darkening and melting of the ice as part of the Deep Purple project. Read more about Deep Purple on the project website here: https://lnkd.in/eAtYzHvc and follow them on Instagram for some more insights from the team https://lnkd.in/ejx8Xbup. Deep Purple is funded by the European Research Council (ERC).
The original post can be found at https://www.linkedin.com/posts/envs-au_drifting-through-ilulissat-no-audio-activity-6949626298927333376-_TRT
by Alexandre Anesio
The previous blog by Liane G. Benning clearly described the journey of trying to put together a massive and ambitious fieldwork programme for the Deep Purple project, going from the microscopic scale to remote sensing information to demonstrate the impact of ice algae and other impurities on the darkening of the ice, their controls and dynamics. A bunch of names from the brave team will be mentioned here and you can learn more about the team members on our “team” page.
No doubts, we started in a very high mood. However, as team 1 (Principal Investigator Martyn Tranter, Lasse, Rey, Joe, Ian, Eva, Shunan, and Lou) started their journey from Denmark on the 1st of July and began the process of setting up the camp, they were hit by a number of obstacles. The weather was far worse than predicted, delaying helicopter trips to the ice camp from the lovely Greenlandic town of Qaqortoq (https://visitgreenland.com/da/destinationer/qaqortoq/). Corona just started to hit Greenland, which had faired very well until ca one week after we arrived. We had to separate our teams between vaccinated and non-vaccinated members of the group, reschedule the science programme and wait for good weather. The task of setting up a camp for ca 16 people at a time on the ice was more challenging than anticipated. Team 2 (myself, Marie, Ate, Frederik, Chris, Pamela and Leeds University beloved collaborator Jim McQuaid) arrived on the 8th of July with half of team 1 still in Qaqortoq. It took five days before we were all on the ice, but we had to leave Martyn Tranter behind in Qaqortoq to serve as a very needed organizer and local fixer on the ground, securing communications between ice and civilization, sending of the samples back to Denmark/Germany, organising flights and all sorts of things (even buying 15 rain ponchos that turned out to be a quite nice addition to keep the team on the ice dry).
Deep Purple camp when it was at its max capacity. Photo Alex Anesio
Team 3 (Principal Investigator Liane G. Benning, Helen, Elisa, and Laura Perini) arrived on the 12th of July to Qaqortoq but only managed to get on the ice ca 5 days later since Qaqortoq went into lockdown. Meanwhile, Teams 1 and 2 had just experienced 52 mm of rain on the ice in a 24 h period. Within just one 1 h of Team 3’s arrival, another 47 mm of rain fell. Considering the conditions (both weather and corona uncertainty), Team 4 had to cancel their travel plans, but their science plans were re-distributed between us to ensure all science was carried out. This left us behind time-wise, but then a spell of good weather hit, and that, coupled with great spirits in the team and the desire to get a lot of work done, was just what we needed.
A massive transformation on the ice was now happening in front of our eyes with the ice algae blooming. The rain had seemed to wash microbial cells together with impurities, but a few days of dry weather in the middle of the summer darkened the ice at incredible speed. At this point, the camp was running like a watch; carnivores were eating like vegetarians, freezer, fridge and -80 degree freezer were getting full with samples, the solar panels were providing all the energy necessary to fuel all sorts of equipment, and our journalist and TV visitors managed to make it all the way to the ice sheet (no names mentioned yet ;-)). All this happened as we received news from the civilization that Greenland was having unprecedented amounts of rain and the IPCC report was released, demonstrating the urgency of more understanding of feedback mechanisms between different stressors and fueling the young scientists in the project with a clear sense of purpose.
Slowly, parts of Teams 1, 2 and 3 left this year’s field camp, having done their jobs brilliantly. On the 6th of August, I arguably had the most glorious day of my scientific life. The final team of six scientists (Lou, Shunan, Liane, Elisa, Laura P, and myself) and our field logistics whizz Lasse woke up to blue skies. As luck would have it, that day satellites were passing above our location and we had a full day collecting data from the microscopic scale to cm and then meters to make the full connection of what we see on the ground and what satellites observe from the sky. The ice algae were in full bloom and the ice surface was full of very active ice algae. We walked about 20,000 steps, collecting pictures of the ice, spectral signatures and samples for all sorts of omics. Flights with the drone matching the satellite passing were also done. It was a tiring day that went on throughout the night, with additional midnight sampling to check how the ice algae behave when it is dark. Our luck continued during the few hours of darkness, as a rare event of northern lights put icing on the cake ̶ what a fantastic day.
Left: Ice surface (tens of cm scale). Picture taken from 1.7 m distance from the ice. Photo Alex Anesio
Right: Ice surface picture taken with a handheld microscope (mm scale). The pigmented ice algae is very abundant on the ice (example of a filamentous algae shown by the arrow), which essentially explains a lot of the darkening of the ice. As the ice becomes darker, more melting occurs. Photo Alex Anesio
After that, it was time to start the long process of decamping. Not easy, but it went super-smooth. Almost 4 tonnes of science and camping gear had to be removed from the ice, dried back in Qaqortoq and carefully packed into a container for transport back to Aarhus University at Risø and the German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam labs. Most importantly, the ambitious plan set at the beginning of the project paid off. We shipped back 100 kg of frozen (-20 degrees) samples, 150 kg of cold samples and 6 cryoshippers (-80 degrees) full of samples for metabolomics, metagenomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, pigments, viruses, etc. Lots of experiments were run on the ice to investigate how ice algae respond to various physico-chemical conditions and how they interact with the other members of the microbial community, and a range of bacteria, viruses and fungi are being cultured with novel approaches. Terabytes of spectral data (drone imagery and ground truth measurements on cm scale) are now available.
I could not have had a better field season. A very resilient group of young scientists went through rain and pain and did everything they had planned. Deep Purple transformed wet misery into opportunity. Climate change will likely bring more wetness to the ice sheet. Scientists in Deep Purple did not hesitate to keep collecting samples in the rain, and this might give us a peek preview of how microbial communities behave in the rain on the ice; how the weathering crust is changed in the rain; and how fast it recovers after just a few hours of sun. All these data are fundamentally important for the parametrization of ice albedo into future climate models.
I just want to finish to say a huge thanks to this amazing group of young scientists, wonderful friend and stimulating PIs and flexible supporting project managers, for their friendship on the ice, resilience, enthusiasm and hard work and for making me eat less meat, although I am not sure I will be able eat lentils again for at least 6 months.
