Adventures in Greenland: Day 10: Precipitation Happens

Today started out with some review of proper field technique and safety. The plan for today involved being shuttled out to a drop-off point in our groups. From the drop-off point, we could hike around to collect samples and data wherever we wanted to. After we finished packing up our equipment and making our plans, we headed outside only to find that it had started raining. We all ran back in to grab some more rain gear and plastic bags to wrap our stuff in.

After we made it to the drop-off point, my group headed out along with the group researching water quality and sea tomatoes. We took some water and atmosphere samples. We had a hard time at first trying to keep all our equipment and notebooks dry. Luckily I remembered my mom gave me a rain-proof notebook to use so once we pulled that out things got a lot better. We worked out a system of covering our probes while setting up and trying our best to keep everything relatively dry. I ended up putting all our equipment in a bag and putting it inside my rain jacket. It looked pretty ridiculous but all our equipment stayed pretty dry. It was difficult getting around the terrain today. Everything was pretty wet and I stepped in a lot of mud. Thankfully my shoes kept most of the water out. It is difficult to walk around since a lot of the land is covered by moss-like growth that you sink down in when you walk on it. As soon as you put your foot down you sink about four inches down. Some places were bad enough we just had to run across to keep from sinking.

My group has settled into a pretty good rhythm. Communication is a little difficult sometimes. Sometimes the same phrase goes through English, Danish, and Greenlandic amongst my team members to get everyone on the same page. Today we sampled at a smaller lake, the lake with sea tomatoes, on the ridge, and at the sand dunes. That brings us up to a total of seven testing sites so far. We still have a lot of work to do analyzing data but it will be interesting to see what patterns come out.

With a decent amount of data collected and the promise of a hot shower waiting for us, my group headed in a bit early from the field. We all immediately took some hot showers and had some lunch. Our new food obsession is instant cup of soup from the grocery store. It tastes really good after being in the cold and eating lots of unfamiliar food. All of us Americans keep craving random American foods and talking about them. I personally want a watermelon eegee and Mexican food right now.

Additional excitement came when we got back to the school since they finally got the internet at the school working. The wireless connection is really good in one room so we all piled in there amidst a mess of cords to check email, upload pictures, and update blogs. After a break we set to work organizing our data and analyzing our water samples. I made a color-coded spreadsheet for all our data while Emil tested the samples in our “lab”. We took a break for dinner and then came back to finish working to prepare for the presentations later where all the groups would be presenting their progress.

The presentations went well. We talked about our data and how so far we’ve found that the highest concentration of carbon dioxide was in the sand dune areas while the lowest was on the ice. Our UV data is a little off since it was so cloudy today but we will wait and look for more patterns as we take more data. The other groups had some other good progress today. The musk ox group even saw two musk ox as they were working today. It will be really interesting to see how all the projects come out.

***If you are really fond of polar bears you might not want to read beyond this point***
As we were working we got the news that there had been a polar bear that was shot and killed in the harbor. The harbor is out near the ocean while we are farther inland at the end of the fjord. It is extremely rare to see a polar bear in this region. Polar bears are very dangerous so they shot it for safety reasons. As we learned later, the polar bear had been surviving on seaweed and was not doing well either. They would be bringing the polar bear into town later to the police station so we could go see it later so we were put on alert to know when to head up to town.

After we finished with our work for the night, we walked next door to buy some snacks. As we were walking back we saw everyone jumping in the car since the polar bear had apparently arrived. We all joined in even though I didn’t have my camera and was wearing flip flops while holding an ice cream cone. As soon as we got there it became obvious that nearly the entire town was there. It wasn’t very big and was a female. It was apparently not going to make it. It was a totally strange experience being there. I didn’t know how to really react. Some of the people there were really excited but it was a little upsetting seeing this endangered species. It was clear that I wasn’t in Tucson anymore. It’s amazing how big they are. This one seemed really big and apparently it was a smaller one. It was also interesting hearing from some of the other students who live in northern Greenland. They get polar bears a lot around there. We also heard from some of the people at KISS about how they have unsuccessfully tried to polar bear-proof some of the research stations on the ice.

We all headed back to the school and started wrapping stuff up for the night. I finally caught up on all these blogs, which was nice. I can’t believe we’ve done so much so far.