Arctic Climate Impact Tour 2011

Nick Toberg and Till Wagner went to the North Greenland Sea in September 2011, to measure the properties and thickness of the sea ice aboard the Greenpeace ship ARCTIC SUNRISE - to document their work they started writing this blog.

As the ice was reaching a new record low (see the NSIDC sea ice extent graph) this year, we went back to carry on our work.

Last year, we were joined by SCANLAB, who performed 3d laser scans of the surface of the ice. They are on board again this year, but now we're getting the bottom as well: Hanumant Singh from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is joining with his team to get 3d profiles of the underside of the ice.

So now, for a historic first, we got the whole 3d picture of sea ice floes in the Arctic Ocean.

On board as well this year was the master of it all, our group leader Professor Peter Wadhams.

After the Arctic Climate Impact Tour, Peter and Till travelled to West Greenland and took part in expedition Operation Iceberg - a BBC funded science project that was subsequently featured in the 2 part BBC 2 documentary Operation Iceberg.

07/09/2011

Bears, Cracks and Fog

(by Till)

We just had a few hours of port in Svalbard, exchanging media crews - reuters and arte have gone off the ship and been replaced by 2 southafrican journalists.

 Unfortunately blogging isn't the easiest matter since we don't have internet out on the ice, so i've got to get this out before we leave the longyearbyen fjord...

any volunteers to manage our blog whilst we're out on the ice?
we would email you the content and you'd have to put it up for us... get in touch via my ship's email address: camp2@myas.greenpeace.org

weather is predicted to be absolutely disastrous the next few days, so we're steaming up the west coast of svalbard to seek shelter in ny olesund (or something like that) until it clears up and then we'll cross the framstraight into the ice at a 81N 1E.

This first week has been pretty intense, reuters and arte only really had three days on the ice so they were constantly trying to get shots, interviews etc. At the same time we were coordinating 6 different instruments on the ice and up to 15 people working. Combining that with constant bear presence, extremely thick fog and at one point an ice floe breaking up like quicksand beneath our feet made for quite exciting days.

But who would be better suited to write about these things than the pros from greenpeace and reuters so please check out the following links...

http://twitter.com/#!/jossgarman

http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/blog/climate/bearing-down-us-80-degrees-north-20110906
(that picture is actually from our expedition...)

and look for gerard wynn's stuff over the next days on google news e.g

Arctic ice breaks up as polar bears stalk ship



I'm losing connection any second now so byebye and hopefully speak soon !
at 09:05

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)