Day 2- The ice margin!

Ice sheet with Little Ice Age moraines in foreground (gray).


Simone botanizing


Laura, Meredith, Ross, Xiahong and Simone


Air Virginia


Simone's great find!


View from the ice :)

Before I write about today’s excursion, I should back up and give an overview of the trip. Six of us from Dartmouth College are here in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland for ten days to check out the area for the IGERT seminar next summer. The group includes: Dr. Ross Virginia (Department of Environmental Science), Dr. Meredith Kelly (Department of Earth Science), Dr. Xiahong Feng (Department of Earth Science), Dr. Lenore Grenoble (Department of Russian), Simone Whitecloud (PhD student- Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology) and me- Laura Levy (PhD student- Department of Earth Science).
Today we had an amazing day. We took the day to orient ourselves to the area, with the plan of getting to the ice margin by the afternoon. We started by driving along the Sandflugtdalen, a large, sandy floodplain ~25 km in front of the ice margin. (I’m hoping we have time to explore that area one day while we’re here.) We drove about half way to the ice margin and then parked the car and explored by foot. We could see the ice sheet in the distance and were surrounded by older glacial deposits. While Simone was crouched down, “botanizing”, Meredith and I spent the time looking in the distance at all of the glacial features (“glacializing”?) We were surrounded by a sequence of moraines deposited ~6500 yr BP. As we looked towards the ice sheet, we could see the young, unvegetated moraines of the Little Ice Age. We could also see some amazing patterned ground and some waterfalls that the meltwater flowed over.

This afternoon Simone and I stepped foot on the Greenland Ice Sheet for the first time (Wahoo!) What an amazing experience! The road ended near the ice margin and we climbed down and walked on the ice. You could feel the cold air coming down from the ice sheet and there were numerous meltwater streams that we had to cross (see photo of Ross). You feel incredibly small when you realize how tiny you are relative to the huge ice sheet. We spent a few hours exploring the features of the ice sheet and looking for organic material that could have been overrun by the glacier and then transported to the surface (for radiocarbon dating). We also found a few snow mobiles that were abandoned on the ice.

Tomorrow we are heading in a similar direction to do some more work- I'm looking forward to it.

More tomorrow, Laura