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When I have gone to sea in the past, we have always been far enough offshore that we never see land until arriving back at port. On these trips, you get used to the more subtle array of views the open ocean has to offer—sometimes stormy, sometimes foggy, sometimes calm. When you are lucky you see a whale or dolphin. On this trip we got close to the coast twice in the mouth of fjords off the coast of southwest Greenland. Both times, we arrived in the early morning, only seeing glimpses of land through dense fog. Slowly the fog lifted, and by early afternoon we got better views of the steep, rocky coast and icebergs around us. The Greenland ice sheet (and all glaciers for that matter) slowly grinds up the rock beneath it and deposits fine “glacial flour” at the glacier terminus. One of our scientific goals on this cruise is to understand the impact of these processes on elemental cycles—particularly iron and neodymium—in the ocean. Because glaciers produce a lot of sediment, the mouths of fjords have lots of soft, soupy mud. This makes for easy coring, but we have to modify the multicore so it doesn’t overpenetrate. Ideally, all the multicore tubes will come up half filled with water and half filled with mud, but if the mud is too soft, the whole coring device can sink, which can cause us to lose the sediment-water interface—a critical part of the core. To rectify this problem, we take weight off the multicore and bring out the “snowshoes”. The snowshoes are planks of wood that we attach to the feet of the multicore. Just like snowshoes that you might wear on a winter hike, these planks of wood increase the surface area that is supporting the weight of the multicore and help it float on top of the sediments. The geochemistry of glacial fjords provided a great excuse to get close to shore, but seeing Greenland like this will be a once-in-a-lifetime experience for most of us. As we have come close to the coast, I have been reading about the nearby villages. The town of Paamiut, with a population of 1,300, was at the end of the first fjord we went to. About a week later, we went further south to a second fjord near Qaqortoq, population 3,050, capital of the southern Kujalleq municipality, and the 5th largest town in Greenland. The weather was clearer near Qaqortoq, and we got views not only of the mountains surrounding the fjord, but of the Greenland ice sheet itself—which at first looks like low clouds hanging over the mountain top. Even when we left the fjord mouth, we had great visibility for the rest of that day and into the next. It was hard to stop looking at the views that surrounded us as we continued to take multicores and seawater samples. Mostly it left me with a sense of awe, but it was hard not to feel the vulnerability of the ice sheet when you actually see it up close. As with all the research cruises I have been on in the past, there will be lots of memorable moments, but I think seeing Greenland will be close to the top of the list for a very long time. AuthorSophie Hines Comments are closed.
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