Heading North again…

I’m lifting my head from the semi-organised chaos that is my office, my home office, our family basement and the office workshop to write a quick post. This might be for reasons of despairing procrastination.

The reason for the chaos is that fieldwork season has come round again and on Friday I and my DMI colleague Steffen will be off to Northern Greenland once again. I’ll try to post a few photos to pixelfed (and perhaps even Instagram, though I swore off Meta products after the Brexit fiasco).

This year my focus is again on the melange zone and we’ll be placing our instruments out to record the break-up of the fast ice. I also hope to get time to establish a new snow measurement programme – which I partly piloted last year. However, we will only be 2 scientists instead of the team of 4 this year, so this may have to wait until the second fieldwork period we have planned in early June (when the sea ice starts to break up). We are fortunate indeed that the local hunters, who still live a semi-subsistence lifestyle, are both incredibly competent and helpful and willing and eager to help when we go out on fieldwork.

This photo and excerpt was part of my contribution to a display at the Ocean decade conference in Barcelona next week. Last year we tested an open science variant of the trusted buoys above known as an Open Met Buoy. It’s incredibly smart, and completely open. You can download full instructions and make it and programme it yourself, or , as I did, order them from the german labmaker company who specialise in building open science kit.

Last year was a test of concept, and noone was more astonished than I was that the final set up not only survived the ice break up and floated safely down the fjord, we also managed to retrieve them and I hope they are waiting patiently in Qaanaaq so I can reprogramme and redeploy this year.

I wrote this piece on our work last year, promising a whole load of posts I didn’t end up having time to write. Sadly even my lego scientists never got an update. So instead of promising a whole lot of new posts, let me know what you’d like to see and read about either in the comments here or on my mastodon feed, and I’ll try to make some time to answer one or two of them while we go.

The area we travel to is going through very rapid changes now – not just climatic and environmental, but, perhaps even higher impact, social and cultural. I am privileged to be abel to witness it and we try hard to leave as little impact as possible.

At this stage it’s hard to imagine I’ll ever be ready to leave, but the clock is ticking down..