Today was a good day. Thomas and I took off on a DeHavilland Dash 7 at about 10:30 this morning and scored the front seats of the aircraft, right behind the cargo, so we had loads of room. I was surprised about how busy the Kangerlussuaq airport was. We saw several Dash 7s land, they hold about 50 people, and a Boeing of some sort landed too. The Boeing seemed to disgorge people for a good 15 minutes. The plane to Kulusuk took about an hour and a half, and was pretty full. Air Greenland served a complementary meal and several drinks (which is obviously a bad business practice since non of the airlines in the US do that anymore) . The complementary meal was meat and potatoes. Does anyone else spot a pattern here?
Flying from east to west over the ice sheet was fantastic, and the contrast between what’s going on on the western side and what’s going on, on the eastern side is very obvious. The melt zone on the western side stretched a good half way through the flight, with lakes and rivers on the ice sheet. The ice sheet seemed pretty flat, and there was quite a lot of sediment obvious on the ice. There is no melt zone in Antarctica, so this was a pretty novel experience for me. The eastern side, by contrast didn't have many surficial lakes, but then the surface was also very steep and ended in the sea. The crevasse patterns were amazing and there’s obviously a huge throughput to the glaciers we saw as they all were producing lots and lots of icebergs.
We landed at the busy Kulusuk airport and found our equipment. Our literally tons of equipment (6,000 kg / 13,200 lbs, and over 31 cu meters or more than 1000 cu ft) was waiting for use and taking up an inordinate amount of space in the fire house. I think the folks at the airport will be pleased when we get out of their way. The airport opens at 8 am and closes at 5 pm so we only have a limited amount of time we can work there. We set about getting the gear broken down into sites. The number of batteries needed to power the GPS sites is somewhat dependent on the latitude. Sites in the north of our region around the rapidly changing Kangerlussudaq glacier at about 68 North need more batteries than those in the south of our region at 64 North, because the winter darkness lasts longer and the solar panels don't work at night. So each of our stations has between 12 and 18 big batteries and four quite powerful solar panels. What this amounts to is a lot of unpacking, and moving and charging and just generally extremely heavy lifting. Its easy to work up a sweat, and get covered in grime. In the process I got my new "I went to the creationist museum and all I got was stupider" T-shirt completely mangy. I hope there is a laundry in the hotel.
We put together a frame for our first site, which is going in at Pilappik Island at about 66.88 N, 34.00 W later this week, and got batteries charging and solar panels strung up. We had a mountain of packing material that I am not sure what to do with. There's a lot of trash laying around here, which is a shame. I do not want to add to it.
We left the Airport at 5 pm and got a lift the kilometer or so to the Hotel Kulusk. At the hotel we both have comfortable small rooms with an absolutely unbeatable view. This is not a cheap place to be though. To access the internet is apparently US$15 an hour, which I guess from the remoteness is reasonable. It's cheaper than the US$1.20/min that phone calls cost. We had dinner. Meat and potatoes — what a surprise. Then went for a walk to the little village of Kulusuk itself. The mosquitoes were kind of rough — not the worst I have been in by any means, but there was a lot of them about. But the setting of Kulusuk itself was amazing, icebergs floating in the little harbour. The sun going down over impossibly craggy mountains and brightly coloured houses perched precariously on mountain sides. The town itself, though, needs a lot of help, I feel. The people seem friendly, all saying hello or waving, and the school, store and electricity supply and telecommunications infrastructure look fine, but the place has a massively run-down feel to it. It was a bit of a shock as the hotel and airport are so modern.
I can't judge I guess. I don't live here. I don't make the choices or know the difficulties that people who live here have to go through. There were a lot of kids running around, and a lot of older people taking walks in the fading light. There are benches here and there where people were watching the sun go down. No teens in sight, though, and a cemetery that just seemed very large for such a tiny community. Sled dogs whining and obviously wanting to run, but with the sea ice out, nowhere to go. I imagine when the snow is on the ground the village looks spectacular and clean, but just now it's muddy and absolutely strewn with garbage. We tried to walk around the edge of the village to a bay where some amazingly sculpted icebergs had grounded on the foreshore, but every part of the mountainside was like an open sewer. I didn't want to put this in this blog, and as I said I shouldn't judge, but I wouldn't go back that direction again, and it's also what I saw. It kind of brought me down with a bang from the high that we got when we first started on our way here, getting here, getting the gear, getting things set up and at every turn being confronted with beautiful views. I guess I will have to keep my eyes on the distance. It really must be hard here.