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.

23/07/2012

Operation Iceberg

After an eventful trip to Fram Strait, Peter and I had a quick refreshing stopover in civilisation (one night in copenhagen).  This morning we flew to Ilulisat (formerly Jakobshavn) in West Greenland to join the BBC Science team for the documentary Operation Iceberg (there's a link to the Op Iceberg homepage above). The ship this time is the Islandic MV Neptune and it is (in all honesty) not the Arctic Sunrise - I just miss all the funky hippie drawings and decorations. I'm sharing a cabin with Prof Peter and Keith Nicholls and Povl Abrahamsen of BAS, so it'll be cosy. We'll leave port this evening and will transit to the other side of Baffin Bay where we want to survey a huge (possibly grounded) iceberg (3 times the size of Manhatten) for the next 2 weeks. Oh yes - Ilulisat is fantastic, it's a small harbour town and there is thousands and thousands of small and large icebergs around. I hope that we'll have fairly steady internet on the ship so I'll soon write more about what the plan is and who is involved and why bother.
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