Day 1: Travel to Kangerlussuaq

I had to get up early this morning to catch my flight at 7 am from Amsterdam via Copenhagen to Kangerlussuaq, a city on the western side of Greenland. In Copenhagen I already met other people from our team that will stay with me at the EGRIP camp. One of them is Ernst Jan Kuiper, a former IMAU master student (picture see below)! On the plane, I had a seat in the middle, so unfortunately I could not take many photographs. It is a pity, since we had beautiful weather and flew north of Iceland and across Greenland.

In Kangerlussuaq we were picked up by the EGRIP team and brought to the hostel where we were supposed to stay for the first night, the KISS (Kangerlussuaq International Science Support). This is how many houses look in Kangerlussuaq:

Already in the first briefing 15 minutes later we learned that we will stay here for at least one more day, probably even two. The reason is that it has gotten so warm today at the EGRIP camp that the aircraft cannot land there (or better it cannot take off anymore after landing) because the snow is too soft.  A big disappointment, at least for me. Kangerlussuaq is not really the place where you like to spend a lot of time….

But this is of course quite common for such big campaigns, you are often dependent on the weather. We went to the supermarket to buy some food for the following days (breakfast). Afterwards a group decided to go for a trip to the close-by Russel glacier. I got a seat in one of the cars and then we went off. It turned out to be a very nice trip:

We saw reindeer and drove to a very dry desert-like landscape on our way to the Russel glacier. The last part we hiked to the bottom of the glacier. The view was spectacular, and we could actually get very close (on few meters away) to the bottom of the glacier, just separated by a stream of melt water.

We saw a this big wall of ice, which is in fact only a tiny little piece of the ice sheet where we will go in a few days.

Together with the former IMAU masters student Ernst-Jan Kuiper at the Russel glacier.

It was a very warm day here in Kangerlussuaq as well, about 18°C, and a very strong katabatic wind blowing off the glacier. On our way we found a tent that had been blown away and landed in a lake, and we recovered the tent and brought it back to the KISS.

Well, now we are waiting, we hope that the temperatures at the EGRIP camp will decrease so that we can fly to the  ice sheet soon, but tomorrow we are certainly still in Kangerlussuaq. It is supposed to rain….