Saturday, May 19, 2012

Spring trip to Nuuk

We are entering our last season of field work for our project in Nuuk where we are looking at glacier changes and try to relate those to conditions in the ocean. In a very quick trip, we visited all our over-winter stations (cameras, GPS, and seismic stations) and prepared them for summer.

The fjord just outside Nuuk


The glaciers at the end of the fjord

 The picture below shows Narssap Sermia, a glacier that was relatively stable until a few years ago. But then it woke up and in the past two years it retreated more than 2 km. The gray moraine shows land that was ice covered just a few years ago.
Narssap Sermia
Drained lake by Narssap Sermia
Unfortunately it had snowed a few days before we got here. The fresh white snow and the overcast weather made it very difficult to land on the glacier, and our GPS boxes provided the only reference for the ground.
GPS installation

One of the tools we use are cameras that are set up to take several pictures a day. Here is an example from Kangiata Nunata Sermia over this past winter.


No comments:

Post a Comment