Cape Farewell Greenland Voyage 2007

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As a non-sailor, coming across the Greenland sea was surprisingly exhilarating. Weirdly, the increasing sense of exhilartion appeared to be exponetially linked to a worsening sea state (although my mum will never believe that in a month of sundays!) But now I’m seeing my glacial geomorphology textbooks come to life in a huge, towering, awe-inspiring way.

On the 2nd we went for an afternoon walk on a large moraine complex. One glacier fed into the head of the current fjord, in a north-easterly direction, and yet the east / west orientated striations on virtually all the boulders contained in the moraine suggested that something had come through from a different direction, exerting huge forces that gouged out lines in the solid rock. On climbing up to the top of the ridge I could see another glacier in the far distance, separated from the first one we could clearly see from the boat by a sharp ridge (arete). This glacier has retreated a long way up its valley, and yet with a bit of imagination and going back a few hundreds of years, you could visualise how these two streams of ice would have met, and carved their way out to sea in one massive ice stream. What I had thought to be a lateral moraine would actually have probably been a medial moraine, marking the join between the two glaciers.

On the 3rd we went for an amble in the Nooderlicht. Initially out to investigate a large iceberg, but then through a sound (Sund) round Turner Island. We went into a little inlet part way through the sund in which we were meant to moor last night. Here we saw something I thought I would never see in all my life – snap freezing of the sea within minutes – read Simon’s blog for more detail on this amazing feat of nature.

At the head of this cove was a classic example of a corrie or cirque. This is an amphitheatre shaped depression, usually located high up in the face of a mountain. It acts as an accumulation zone for snow, and will often develop into the head of a glacier. There was no obvious glacier forming in this one, although a trail of snow leading from it suggests that maybe in the past it was a glacial source. Following the snow down from this, there was a sudden drop into a lower valley, where a small glacier was retreating back from the fjord edge. Although not a classic example, this closely resembled a hanging valley, formed when a tributary glacier joins a main ice stream, and is quite literally left hanging when the main ice sheet retreats. What I couldn’t tell from the boat was when this retreat happened – whether or not the retreat has happend recently (on the geological timescale of hundreds of years!) or as part of a natural cycle of advance and retreat.
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Morning broke. to bits of our video cameras laid out on the breakfast table, the scientists pushed aside their toast and got stuck in with cotton buds and alcohol. The afternoon before my camera had caught a wave as we landed the inflatable, then Matt’s camera had been the victim of an overflowing water system. Despite the concentrated efforts of our best camera surgeons, neither camera pulled through. The weather gets everywhere.

Every roll of the ship and change in gravity finds me mentally checking the various stowed cameras, tied cases and lashed lenses around the ship. Did I bring them in? Did I fix them to a new side, now that the ship’s rolling to port? I keep a set of cameras for use outside and a set inside; a cold camera will take over an hour to acclimatise to a warm cabin.

The cold narrates our days here, this afternoon we filmed Liam perform one of his songs sitting on the bow-sprit against a backdrop of snow-drifted mountains. Two takes in, Liam fingers were bleeding. Indoors we are flexible; trying to do the simplest things outside in this cold makes us realise how fragile we can be. Guitarists’ fingers become stiff and brittle.

As I pack up the cables, the fjord’s cold surface forms a glaze popping and crackling below, musing of freezing our ship fast. Around us cloud-capped mountains tower from the water’s edge, looking down on tiny people tending their bleeding fingers, cold flattened batteries and salt-shorted circuits.

We bring cameras, inks, charcoal and guitars to record and respond to this place and are trumped by the interventionist art of climate itself.

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Unartertaqarteq is the West Greenlandic name meaning place with hot springs
(unartoq means hot springs).

Quick freezing sea ice in Turner Sound. (Duration: 1:18mins)

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It’s Wednesday, the sun is shinning again and the mountain scenery of Greenland gets better by the hour. Last night we even had a showing of the Northern Lights courtesy of a relatively clear night. Though we are now focusing on aspects of art, filming and writing – it’s a positive hive of activity aboard the Noorderlicht – we did also get some exciting science. This was the sort that could have kept us on Greenland a bit longer than planned – the sea freezing. We passed into Turner Fjord, a passage between a mountainous island and the mainland more than a fjord really, to look in awe at the glacial terrain elegantly explained by Carol as we went. Part way through the sea took on a slightly slushy consistency, a precursor to the sea freezing.

When a freshwater pond freezes, because the temperature of maximum density (4 deg C) is above the freezing point (zero deg C), a thin layer of very cold stable water sits at the surface as the pond cools towards zero and it freezes slowly from the top down. We have all seen that thin layer of ice that slowly builds up on a pond, lake or even puddle. It causes little problem for vessels in it’s early stages.

When the sea freezes, because the temperature of maximum density (-2.8 deg C) is below the freezing point (-1.9 deg C) for average salinity levels, convection in the water keeps going until the entire water column is close to freezing. This means that when the sea freezes it does so very quickly (hours) and this is why ships can get iced in at sea with little warning.

As we passed into the slush Gert decided to do a quick (15 minute) circle of the area. On the first pass it was slush. By the second it was 2-3 inch ice which was developing very quickly and the ship strained to pull out. One more circle and we would have been there for the winter! We moved on out of Turner Fjord rapidly and realised why, according to the “pilot”, that no one had visited it in the past 70 years. From here on we will be checking the sea temperatures before dropping anchor for the night!

In answer to Tom’s query about Arctic monkeys – the only type of monkey we find up in this part of the World is us – lol. As for Polar Bear pictures? We’ve yet to see the elusive creature but will do our best. With more cameras on board than at an international fashion show trust me, it will become the most photographed bear on the planet.

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It’s the scale of the landscape on East Greenland that humbles and disorients. I’m feeling downright tiny and frail, more like a lone lemming on the tundra than a member of a culture capable of remaking the land and altering global climate.

We’re motoring now through a deep channel called Turner Sound, found on few maps, looping around a mountainous island that appears to be slightly smaller than Switzerland. Our guide, Ko De Korte, with decades of East Greenland experience, tells us that this strip of coast south of Scoresbysund is the widest uttermost wilderness on Greenland, which puts it among the two or three wildest places on the planet. That mariner’s guide The Arctic Pilot, Vol. II tells Captain Gert Ritsema that Turner Sound was transited fifty years ago, but as to what manner of vessel it was or what the mariner should expect once in the sound the book does not elaborate. If any human ever set foot ashore around here, he couldn’t have gotten very far inland because the mountains plunge nearly vertically into the frigid water. Their layered black basalt flanks, mostly covered in snow, are gouged by ancient river courses, and the deep valleys between them scoured by glacial action.

A white gyre falcon, curious apparently, orbits Nooderlicht’s masts, while we humans stand about on deck shivering, snapping photos, jaws agape, exclaiming (sometimes profane) utterances in lieu of cogent statements about the dizzying magnitude, the sheer mass of the landscape. How can we express it, anyway? Facts and figures seem irrelevant measurements of these mountains, metaphor inadequate. How can there actually be such a place as East Greenland?… The sun is shinning incongruously, the sky azure blue, and we’re not used to that after our grim, eight-day crossing of the Greenland Sea.

But now some foul weather seems to be forming out east, and the ice bergs, calendar-photo beautiful an hour ago, are taking on a menacing air. If we’re to go for a walk on the flat margins of the glacier dead ahead, we’d better hurry. Nooderlicht’s anchor chain clatters through the pipe as the shore party gathers gear, and we’re ready…. No, wait, we’re not going. The fjord is freezing fast. No one aboard has ever seen salt water freeze so fast. We must move on or remain until summer returns.