2023 Greenland Expedition - Day 9 Heading North

Why Greenland? In August, not for the Northern Lights!

There is an Aurora Forecast channel on our cabin tv. Almost all the time, it appears that we are in a good location to see the Northern Lights. 

So I checked the weather app to see what time we should wake up for a good viewing opportunity. 

The sun is not setting for at least another seven days. I guess we’re unlikely to see the Persied meteor shower peaking on August 12, either. (Although we’ll be further south then, so maybe….)

Last night we bid farewell to Scoresbysund and saw an approximation of a sunset late in the evening, You can see the problem with stargazing or the northern lights. 

There are a couple of storytellers among our multi-talented expedition team. Historian Niek, who since childhood has been obsessed with all things Viking, turned up last night in full Viking regalia (“not a dress”) to tell the story of how Thor lost his Hammer. 

We spent today cruising north along the coast of East Greenland, towards Northeast Greenland National Park. We were stymied by sea ice for several hours, but finally started moving forward mid-morning. We entered the borders of the park around 4 PM, and are now cruising into Kong Oscar Fjord . It’s been hazy all day, with low cloud cover, occasional drizzle and fairly low seas. A good, lazy day to sit with a coffee and a book, and watch the changing seascape. 

I went to lectures on sea birds and glaciers, and Greg added a workshop on knots. 

East Greenland National Park is the largest national park in the world, and the 10th largest protected area (the larger protected areas consist mostly of sea). It was established in 1974, and expanded to its present size (375,000 square miles) in 1988. Only 29 countries are larger (166 countries are smaller).

Red is Northeast Greenland National Park. Arrow denotes our position tonight. 

The mountains along the coast are different here, black and hulking. Or maybe it’s just the gray skies today.

The further we’ve come into Kong Oscar Fjord, the less sea ice we’ve seen. This may change as we approach a massive tidewater glacier tomorrow morning. 

Tomorrow we hope to have a zodiac cruise and later, a landing. We hope for favorable conditions. As I mentioned a few days ago, more people summit Mount Everest every year than visit this National Park. We are privileged to be here, whether we land or not. 

Notes on Greenland and glaciers - or Grim Facts from today’s lecture:

At its deepest levels, the Greenland ice sheet is between 115,000 and 130,000 years old, and over 1.9 miles thick. The newest levels are less than 11,700 years old. It’s an almost inconceivable amount of water. If the entire Greenland ice sheet melted, sea level worldwide would rise about 24 feet. Goodbye to Florida, Chesapeake bay communities, island communities around the world. 

Snow appears white due to light refracted and reflected from air bubbles caught in snowflakes. When snow accumulates for hundreds and thousands of years, it compresses under its own weight to ice. When all of the air has been squeezed out, the ice is blue. So pure ice is always blue. 

Two kinds of glaciers: mountain/alpine glaciers (ending in mountains), and tidewater glaciers (which end at waterfront). They move by gravity, driven by their weight. They impact the landscape by transporting sediments to land or water, deposit debris (erratic boulder fields), create moraines and glacial striation. 

Glaciers have grown and retreated for eons. The concern today is the unprecedented speed at which they are shrinking. Worldwide, they are decreasing in both thickness and length. This table represents the status of 1400 glaciers. For every four that are increasing in size, 1096 are decreasing. The other 300 empty pink circles? They represent glaciers that have disappeared altogether.

Jakobshavn Glacier in West Greenland drains 6.5% of the Greenland ice sheet and produces 10% of Greenland’s icebergs. It has retreated more in the last ten years than in the previous 100. 

In Glacier National Park in Montana, there were 150 glaciers in 1850. Today there are only 25 which are considered big or active enough to be classified as a glacier. Several studies predict that by 2030, the glaciers which gave the park its name will be all gone.