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David’s ‘Hello’ is a great summary of the aim of the voyage and the whole project and gives an insight of what is happening on board.
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My eyes opened this morning to a seascape of icebergs barely outside my cabin. We had moved much further north overnight, toward the Disko Bay area. The area is littered with icebergs that originate from the Ilulissat glacier, move through the Ilulissat ice fiord and dump into the ocean in Disko Bay.
The glacier is sick. It has climate change. As a result, the glacier is retreating at a lightning pace. Right now, it is retreating by 38 metres per day; over the last 10 years, it retreated by more than 16 kilometres.
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We just passed the 48-hour mark of our 10-day journey aboard the Grigory Mikheev. We’ve traveled north from Kangerlussuaq to Disko Bay, and en route, heard from the two groups of scientists on board – one of which is mapping the West Greenland current and the other, characterizing sedimentation in the ocean bed in order to reconstruct historical sea levels.
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On top of my warmies, I’m bringing to Greenland with me a cough, a cold and some congestion. My pharmasaviour advised I take some decongestant before I hit the skies. I did. It wore off about just before I hoped it would. As the plane initiated its descent, I had some serious head pains. It kind of felt like my eyeballs were going to explode. There was definitely one of blood, sweat or tears coming from them. I got another decongestant down with a dry swallow, leaned back in my chair and prayed my little sudafeds were of the fast relief variety. Minutes later, I’m all right.
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With only a few hours to go before uniting with the first of the crew to arrive here in Iceland, and only a few more hours again before heading off to our launch point, we are down to the wire. Expectations are still unclear, although one of my soon-to-be crew mates’ blog posts reads “expectations set to the sun”. That seems about right.
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I’m up, up and away, high in the sky somewhere not too far from home, en route to Iceland, where I’ll be tomorrow before meeting the rest of the crew on Friday morning and then heading on to Greenland where the expedition really begins.
Seems proper to write about my expectations for this trip. What would you expect from twelve days with an all-star cast of artists as diverse, accomplished and as professionally foreign from the science-trained among us as they can possibly be? And mix in a few scientists who are far more science-trained than most of the science-trained among us. And then stick them on a boat, and have a boat ride up and down the coast of Greenland. That doesn’t sound like a recipe for anything – or at least, nothing I know to exist.
I hear there’ll be an electronic piano on the ship, and there was a call out for the guitarists to bring their guitars. One guy makes noises with his mouth. Annie Mac says the sounds that boy makes with his mouth! I wonder what else he’s good at? Surely there’ll be a few other instruments – harmonicas, triangles, some drums maybe. I’ll look for some frying pans to smash my chopsticks on.
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