Postcard: Greenland
By Bryan Walsh
To understand what has happened to the earth's atmosphere--and, therefore, how our climate might change in the future--some ice-core scientists in the Arctic are training their eyes directly downward. It's an incredibly important job. It's also, as the participants in the North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling (NEEM) project will attest, incredibly fun. Where else can you snowmobile all day across Olympic-quality piste, make modern art out of 200-year-old ice crystals and relax at "night" (the sun never sets during the arctic summer) with copious amounts of Carlsberg beer delivered by the U.S. Air Force? Oh, and in your downtime, you can extract ancient cores of ice that contain atmosphere from tens of thousands of years ago. "It's a cool gig," says Trevor Popp, a postdoctoral student and ice-core driller.
The gig can also be downright freezing, as I discover when our visiting group (a collection of journalists, scientists and Danish environmental officials) decamps from the C-130 Hercules transport plane that brought us to NEEM. It's maybe --9DEGC (16DEGF) on the ice--balmy, as far as summertime goes on the Greenland ice sheet. Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, the motherly Danish field leader of the NEEM project, greets us at the camp's main kitchen, dining room and work space: a toasty geodesic dome straight from the winter dreams of Buckminster Fuller. I quickly learn that a great deal of time in an arctic research camp is spent preparing and sharing food. In part, that's because the body churns through calories in the cold. But those shared meals--featuring steaks half the size of Frisbees on this particular night--and leisurely coffee breaks foster a family atmosphere among the international scientists at NEEM, all but a handful of whom are fun-loving Europeans.
Yet despite the Jimi Hendrix playing on the dome's stereo and the empty mini-kegs of Heineken, this isn't polar summer camp. The scientific work being done at NEEM is as hard as it is necessary. About a mile (1.6 km) outside the main camp, Danish scientists Steffen Bo Hansen and Sigfus Johann Johnsen drill holes 70 meters down. The ice beneath NEEM is more than a mile and a half (2.5 km) thick, the result of over 130,000 years of accumulated snow. Tiny air bubbles from the year the snow fell are trapped in layers of frost, and when the ice is brought back to the surface, scientists can analyze the ancient atmosphere and discover the temperature and carbon dioxide concentration of Greenland's air, say, 115,000 years ago. That's the end of the Eemian geologic period, the warm era before the earth's last Ice Age (which ran until about 11,700 years ago). We know the planet was some 3DEG to 5DEGC (5DEG to 9DEGF) warmer during the Eemian period than it is today, and by analyzing the NEEM ice core, researchers might be able to figure out how the Greenland ice sheet--which contains enough frozen water to raise sea levels by 7 meters if it were all to melt--might react as our own climate warms. No one knows what the tipping point for rapid melting might be, but NEEM could help us find out. "Without an understanding of the past, there's no hope we can predict what will happen in the future," says Dahl-Jensen.
Standing on the seemingly endless ice cap, where blinding white stretches in all directions, I find it hard to imagine ever losing Greenland. But the island has surrendered an average of 150 billion tons of ice over the past four summers, melting away like the cubes of glacier--dating back to 1816--that the scientists drink in glasses of whiskey at a farewell party. As it warms, we'll probably lose more, but the hope is that through projects like NEEM, we will finally understand our climatic past before meeting our uncertain future. The scientists here think we're running out of time--a concept that loses all meaning through the nightless arctic summer. I force myself to go to bed at about 11:30 and try to sleep despite the light. I wake up once to use the bathroom and stagger outside my tent. It's 2 a.m. The sun is bright and getting brighter.