Day 5: On the ice sheet

Finally I am in the EGRIP camp!

We had a fascinating flight to the ice sheet. Everyone was excited when w
e were picked up and driven up to the airport where the aircraft was waiting for us.   We left Kangerlussuaq around 9:30, again a happy moment after 4 days of waiting. In the Hercules aircraft you sit in the big cargo area, it is very loud (fortunately I had packed my headphones), but shortly after takeoff you can stand up and walk around. 

I spent most of the flight at one of the small windows staring outside. In the beginning you see the mountainous Greenland landscape with many lakes and snow on the mountains. But already after some minutes you could see the ice sheet in the east. It was fascinating to see that close to the ice sheet margin there are hundreds of blue lakes of meltwater on the ice. After some time the lakes ended and all we could see was the flat white ice sheet. It is so white that even from the aircraft you had to put on sunglasses to see. 15 minutes before landing we had to put on our polar gear (trousers, jacket, shoes, gloves, etc.) and get back to our seats.

After about 2 hours we arrived at EGRIP, landing on skis. In order to have a very quick unloading and loading procedure, the back of the plane was opened and the big pallets with the cargo were simply pushed out of the plane while it was still taxiing to the final stop. We could already see the EGRIP camp through the windows, and when we got out the previous  crew was welcoming us. Everyone knew some colleagues that have been here the last weeks, and it was a happy, but quick hello and goodby, because after their cargo was loaded they had to enter the plane and take off. In the meantime we had brought our carry-on luggage to the main dome. It was beautiful weather, and the temperature was about -12 ºC.

After the aircraft had left again, we had lunch and got to know in which tent we will be sleeping. I share my tent with Thomas (yes, another Thomas) and Johannes, who are both also in the firn air drilling team. This will be my home for the next 19 days (my bed is the one in the back):

You can see from these pictures that our colleagues have built up an amazing infrastructure here in the last years. Every thing is organized extremely well. But I will write more about the camp in the next days.

After getting our stuff into the tents, the work started. Our firn air pumping project will not take place inside the camp, but about 1 km outside, because we want to sample very clean air and have to avoid contamination from the activities on camp (exhaust from vehicles, etc).

So we had to bring all our equipment to the firn drilling site, and this was really hard work. We estimate that we have moved about 1500 kg of material in boxes today. First we had to put the boxes on sledges, and the fun part of it was that we drove all the boxes out to the firn drilling sites with the snow mobiles. To keep everything as clean as possible, we stopped the snow mobiles between 50 and 150 m before the drill site, depending on how heavy the load was, and then either carried the boxes through the snow, or pushed the sledge (with usually ~500 kg) of material to the drill site. Here you see a photograph of one of our snow mobile transfers of the boxes (we made 4 of these trips….). But we were quite happy, proud but also exhausted when all the boxes were standing at the drill site, in the middle of nowhere.

We were just back for dinner at 7 pm (actually our group was a few minutes late), where we had dinner with the entire crew. After many discussions and planning for tomorrow, most people have left for their tents. I am also tired now (it is 11 pm) and although the sun is still pretty high on the sky I will go to bed, and hopefully sleep well.

It was an overwhelming day for me with so many impressions and activities, this is an enormous adventure, and you will hear more of it in the coming days.