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The Polar Museum: news blog

Posts Tagged ‘PhD’

We’re All Going on A Summer Not-Holiday: Part 1

Saturday, May 27th, 2017

This blog post is written by PhD student Samuel Cook

Five of us from the Scott Polar Research Institute – me, Tom, TJ (all PhD students), Antonio (a postdoctoral researcher) and Poul (our supervisor) – are going to be spending the entirety of July doing fieldwork in Greenland. Specifically, at Store Glacier, about halfway up the west coast of Greenland. We’ll be joined by researchers from other institutions and will be conducting a variety of scientific work – such as setting up time-lapse cameras at the calving front (i.e. the end of the glacier where ice falls off into the fjord), using drones to gather improved data on the glacier’s surface elevation and velocity, and radar measurements of ice thickness and basal properties – at several different locations on the glacier, up to 60 km into the interior of the ice sheet.

The location of Store Glacier (inset). The big green thing is the domain I use in my modelling work.

The location of Store Glacier (inset). The big green thing is the domain I use in my modelling work.

This presents several challenges. To start with, a logistical one: getting that many people and all the things they need to survive and use (food, tents, scientific equipment, clothes, etc….) to somewhere that could charitably be described as the middle of nowhere isn’t simple. We have to drive van loads of the bulkier stuff over to Aalborg in Denmark so that that can be shipped to Greenland, but this has to be done a few weeks in advance of our departure (June 27th) to make sure it arrives before we do. To get to Greenland ourselves, we have to fly via Copenhagen (Greenland being Danish, flying from Denmark is the easiest route), then on to Greenland. We then have to take a couple of internal flights within Greenland and a couple of helicopter journeys to get to the vicinity of Store. All this has to be done with us carrying all our personal kit. Such fun. And there’s all the paperwork to fill in to satisfy EU, British and Greenlandic customs regulations. It just gets better.

We also have to buy and test all the equipment, as well as buying all our own personal gear. This is a) expensive, b) complicated and c) tiring. It turns out two days of putting up and taking down a succession of tents to check for tears is hard work. On the plus side, they all seem to be intact. Unlike my fingers. I’ve also spent a gratuitously-large amount of money on buying all sorts of outdoorsy equipment to ensure I have enough clothing for a month. And so I don’t die of exposure. Or mosquitoes. There are going to be a lot of mosquitoes. You can’t catch anything from them, but the bites are unpleasant enough anyway.

Antonio, TJ, Tom and I setting up the biggest of the tents.

(Left to right) Antonio, TJ, Tom and I setting up the biggest of the tents.

Finally, there’s also a huge amount of university admin to wade through, funding to be applied for and so on. All of which also has to be done well in advance, and not forgetting the need to actually plan what we’re doing once we’re in the field, to make sure we don’t leave anything vital behind. The group has a lot of spreadsheets on the go, to put it mildly.

So, in terms of all the necessary preparatory work, it’s pretty safe to say that glaciological fieldwork is a long way from being a straightforward experience. Once we’re back at the end of July, I’ll write another post about the actual fieldwork. Watch this space…