[Music]
John Sonntag: Our flight today takes us from Longyearbyen, Svalbard back to Thule, back west,
back to one of our main bases of operation after a bit of a
one-week sojourn over here in Svalbard.
We started off the mission with some flightlines
over Svalbard’s ice sheets – small ice sheets – and glaciers.
Of course that’s not the reason we went
to Svalbard to begin with. We went there to expand our sea ice coverage
over on the eastern side of the pole, which is a very exciting science goal
for the project.But it turns out that in order to get to that sea ice
you have to fly over large portions of Svalbard itself.
It gives us a nice long comparison
of where the glaciers were 15 and 20 years ago versus where they are
now in terms of volume.
In addition to the ATM data over these glaciers, we’re also getting some very very modern
state of the art radar data from the MCoRDS sounder, from the
accumulation radar which tells us a lot about the snow accumulation
in the last several years in the top several meters of the
ice on Svalbard, and also from the snow radar, which is also a
new instrument.
We only mapped glaciers in Svalbard today for about 20 minutes. That’s how long it took us to get off into the Fram Strait
off the northwest corner of the archipelago. And that takes us into some really
interesting sea ice there. It changes dramatically. The sea ice changes dramatically
as you cross the Fram from east to west. It starts out with a little bit of open water there
at the northwest tip of Norway and then you get into some broken up pack ice,
looks like a big piece of ice that someone took a hammer to,
and shattered, a giant hammer. Really it’s pretty stuff, neat looking.
And then it gets more and more consolidated as you go west.
The Fram Strait by the way is
the primary pathway that sea ice from the Arctic Basin gets out
to the warmer oceans of the world.
After we got to Greenland
we turned north and made sort of an M-shaped pattern,
and the purpose of that was to track the gradient of sea ice, the thickest oldest sea ice
near the coast of Greenland and getting thinner up toward the pole.
And then we’ll finish out the mission today heading into the Nares Strait,
going across the ice arch at the top of the strait, it’s an arch of ice
it’s kind of an interesting, almost a structural looking feature
on satellite imagery and out the window.
And then we go back to Thule, spend the weekend,
rest up after our many time zones of travel this week, we’re all pretty tired,
rest up over the weekend and then start up again next week.
[music fades]