Images of

THE ARCTIC

Kangerlussuaq

Photos © 2004 Seth White

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Around the time I was doing the South Pole/McMurdo site visits earlier this year, my boss Jim at Biospherical asked if I'd be interested in joining him during the upcoming trip to Summit Camp, Greenland. It didn't take long for me to get pretty keen on the idea, but because of my prior commitments and the uncertainty in the schedules for the Arctic program's summer operations, I wasn't sure if I could go. It wasn't until I was at Palmer Station that the flight schedules were solidified enough that it would work out for me to come. This was excellent news. As it turned out, my PQ from the Antarctic Program transferred to the Arctic, and I also managed to buy a set of ECW. So the first step in travelling to Greenland with the US Arctic Program is flying via commercial air to Albany, NY. You stay there for a night or two and then head to the Stratton Air National Guard base in Scotia, where the New York ANG 109th Airlift Wing will fly you via LC-130 Hercules to Kangerlussuaq, Greenland. And of course, this is usually an early morning affair - we had to be at the base at 5:15 AM. So we watched the obligatory safety video, had a brief lecture, sat around a while, sat around some more, then figured out where the coffee was. We ended up taking off pretty soon thereafter, around 8:30. Here is an LC-130 at Stratton, in an unfamiliar setting to me: on warm pavement! The only other times I'd seen these planes were in very cold, icy places. As a note, the US is the only country which flies the LC-130's, due to restrictions in the government's contract to Lockheed Martin, who builds the planes. Lots of countries fly C-130's, but the ski-equipped LC-130's are limited to US use only. And the ANG guys who do they flying in the Arctic are more or less the same guys who fly down south. The 109th has been flying in the Arctic since the 70's, and took over the LC-130 operations in the Antarctic from the Navy VXE-6 squadron in 1999.

So, on the plane. A pic here of us marching on board. The flight to Kangerlussuaq is about 6 hours, and it went relatively fast. As a note, VECO Polar Resources is the logistics provider for the NSF's Arctic Program, analogous to RPSC in the USAP. Actually, that's about as far as the comparison goes. Although Veco Polar was started by a group of people who left the USAP to pursue the NSF's Arctic contract, it is a much smaller and ENTIRELY different operation than RPSC.

After landing at Kangerlussuaq, we were met by the VECO people and headed over to the Kangerlussuaq International Science Support (KISS) building. Here is the LC-130. I think this picture turned out pretty good - the rain on the pavement and the overcast sky make it look all the more badass than it already does.

Here it is: the KISS building. I remember reading somewhere that Kangerlussuaq was Greenland's largest city...but this, upon inspection, is quite inaccurate. There are only a few hundred year-round residents, and the town is, in a three-word description, very very basic. The town seems to exist mostly for tourism, which is fueled largely by the presence of the country's best airport. This town was originally named Sondre Stromfjord, and was a US air base of strategic importance during the cold war (called "Bluie West Eight"). The last Americans left the base in 1992, but the town itself is still pretty much comprised of the structures erected by the US during our days here. Very military looking, still. Greenland was actually some prime real estate in the cold war, and has a very intersting 20th century history. I ran across this link with a condensed history of Greenland from the 900's thru the 1950's here. At the bottom of this page there are some other great Greenland links, including a nice site about Thule. I would like to go there, although I don't imagine I will have the opportunity to do so for work. I'm pretty sure my father was there for a while during the Vietnam days...and it seems like a heck of a place. I was reading about the Thule weather conditions, and it sounds similar to McMurdo. It's close to the same latitude, and has similar temperatures and weather conditions. That Thule site has some interesting pages, including ones about the old Camp Century, a nuc-powered camp under the ice cap near Thule, and the proposed "operation iceworm" which was a bizarre idea kicked around during the cold war.

Sitting by the door of the KISS building is this: a JATO (jet assisted take-off) bottle. Since Summit Camp is at such high altitude, the Hercules often have a hard time getting enough lift to take off, especially if they are heavily loaded. So the ANG will usually strap sets of these things to either side of the plane to help get them up to speed more quickly. I haven't seen a take-off with the JATO bottles, but hope to before I leave. I hear it's pretty cool when they light these things - they are basically little solid rocket motors.

Another view of lovely and inviting Kangerlussuaq. This is actually one of the most picturesque scenes of the town itself. I'm not kidding - this row of brightly colored boxes is very aesthetic by local standards, and that's actually what caught my eye to take this picture. But hey, it was a military base only 10 years ago, and there isn't a hell of a lot of cash for 'urban redevelopment'. And that is just fine by me. The town is surrounded by some beautiful, rugged scenery. Kangerlussuaq is Inuit for "end of the fjord", and indeed it sits at the end of a very long fjord. There is a shipping port about 10 miles from town and there are many musk ox and caribou to be seen near here.

A VECO warehouse, where they store the issue ECW and some cargo. We drove over after dinner the day we arrived, and, so, yes, following is a picture of...

...our cargo pallet. Lots of stuff here, pretty much all of it for ours. Nearly all of it is equipment, gear, and such, but two of the totes are filled with beer and wine. Yep, you gotta bring your own beverages to Summit Camp. So Jim scored a couple cases of beer and a few bottles of wine. Presently, I'm sipping a Deschutes Black Butte porter...no second-rate barleys here.

Inside the KISS building there are some pretty decent mountain bikes you can use. Biking is a popular mode of transport here, actually. So after dinner I got a nice Bianchi (with a Marzocchi fork, brakes that work, and deraileurs that were well adjusted) and went for a little ride around town. Here is a nice-looking building that I guess is a church, or a school, or both?

Kangerlussuaq is just north of the Arctic Circle...first time I have been this far north. I had seen a few shows on the Discovery Channel about the Arctic, but I was really curious to see a little bit of the land myself, especially the plant life. Here are some pretty flowers I ran across. These, according to the Lonely Planet Arctic guide, are Broad Leaved Willow Herbs.

Another one of the same flowers. I arrived at a good time in Kanger (as the people in the program call it). It was relatively warm, green, and mosquito-free. I heard that earlier in the month the bugs were murderous...glad I missed that.

There is a river that dumps into the fjord near the town, which was running pretty fast when I got there. Here's a pic.

Here is a pic looking back across the end of the fjord to Kangerlussuaq. The soil in the bottom of the fjord is actually pretty picturesque.

Kangerlussuaq actually has more roads around it than any other town in Greenland (I think). There is a road out to the port, a road to the edge of the ice cap, and another road which goes outside of town past a lake (and where from there, I dunno). I took the road towards the lake and ran across this little gully, and thought it was pretty enough to take a photo.

Another pic of the same thing.

A creek, a little ways farther. The little white dots along the ground are the tufts of cotton grass.

Another one of the creek, looking back towards town.

Looking down the shores of the fjord.

A little farther up, I found this old communications site. The antennas looked pretty vintage and in a state of disrepair, so I assumed this was an old cold war installation. Lots of that kind of thing in Greenland. There is an old DEW (Distant Early Warning) radar site at the present-day Raven Camp site operated by VECO, and there's an outside chance chance I might get to stop there before I leave. They need some hands to help pull the flags out of the summer skiway operated there for the ANG, so Jim and I volunteered. Raven is about a 30 minute flight from Kangerlussuaq.

One of the antennas. For some reason this installation was interesting to me. It points straight down the fjord, so I'm guessing it was part of a point-to-point comms network.

The next 6 pics here are just plants from a little walk off the road. This one is a little blue flower whose name I don't know.

Another one. For some reason these little plants that survive in such brutal places (and manage to produce such pretty flowers) are fascinating to me.

A typical thing you see if you look down walking around. I didn't see any critters during the ride, but based on the amount and variety of turds, this place seems to have quite an animal population. Actually, I have read that Kangerlussuaq is the best place in Greenland to see Caribou and Musk Ox. I hope to have enough time in Kanger on my way out to spend a day riding farther out of town. The edge of the ice cap is about 15 miles away on a nice road, so that would be a great day trip. We'll see...

Another colorful patch of mosses and lichens on the rocks.

This is a photo of the typical landscape under your feet as you walk along the hills surrounding the town. It's packed with all sorts of small plants, mosses, and scrubby bushes, and in many places the surface is a very soft layer of peat-moss-type things....

...like this. This stuff is about a couple inches thick and is soooo soft. I read in the lonely planet that that the insect-eating sundew and butterwort live in areas like this. I pulled up a few pictures of these plants online, and am going to search for them on my way out. Always thought insectivorous plants were cool, and it would be bitchin' to see them growing wild.

I rode back to the side of town opposite the airfield, but didn't find much to photograph. I mean, "no frills" is the operative phrase when describing Kangerlussuaq architecture. However, there was this rock on the side of the road that someone had painted a mural on. Greenland has about 50,000 people, and approximately 10,000 are Danes and 40,000 are Inuit.

I was sitting on the porch of the KISS building one afternoon and Geoff drove up with some more Summit people and asked if I wanted to join them in visiting some huskies. The huskies are kept towards the end of the runway so we drove out. One dog had given birth to a litter at the beginning of the summer, so here is one of them. These dogs grow fast.

More of the sled dog pups.

These dogs have a reputation for being somewhat mean, but nonetheless the puppies are quite cute. And all the dogs were happy to see us and were very friendly...but then again this is probably because most times they see people it's the owners coming to feed them.

Another day, Katie and I went over to the Kangerlussuaq Museum.

The museum is mainly devoted to aviation, and there is a remarkable amount of interesting stuff in here - survival equipment, cold weather gear, aviation electronics, communications equipment, from military, commercial, and exploratory flight. Particularly interesting to me was the wealth of info about various airplane crashes around the area and subsequent salvage efforts, including retrieving one which had gotten buried under the ice. There is also a limited amount of historical stuff about the Inuit and the areas surrounding Kangerlussuaq.

Some old commmunications and navigation equipment.

This was pretty cool - a reconstruction of an old USAF meeting room. The table itself is made from beautiful reddish wood. It was easy to imagine some tense moments around this table in the early 1960's.

On a lighter note, this notice in the meeting room cracked me up...

After his transatlantic flight, Lindbergh did a lot of exploratory flying around the North Atlantic, including several stops in Greenland. The museum has one of his mail sacks.

A panoramic view of Sondre Stromfjord, aka Bluie West 8, in the old days.

Near Lake Ferguson, some Inuit ruins were found which dated back to the 1500's. They used a spot overlooking the fjord as a summer hunting camp, and in the early part of this century some Inuit hunters were reported as still using the same site. The VECO end-of-season party was held at the fire house near the lake, so Katie and I walked out to try to find this site. But even with this photo of the museum display on my camera and some (not too helpful) directions from someone at the party, we couldn't find any evidence of the site. We found a location we though had to be the site, but no indications of anything man-made at all, not even a circle of stones. I wonder if we were in the wrong spot? Or, has the site been covered up...or maybe damaged beyond recognition by other people?

One last thing from the museum - a display about the DYE sites in Greenland. During the cold war, the US established the Distant Early Warning network of radars designed to detect launches of ICBM's from the USSR and give us time to retalliate. This photo shows what a typical site looked like, and the map shows the locations of the DYE sites. One of these sites is about a kilometer from Raven Camp, a summer-only site with two airstrips, mostly used for training by the ANG. According to some people who have been inside the building, it is as if the US military just simply walked away when the radar system was decomissioned. There is all sorts of stuff laying around, from food to equipment manuals to cans of beer...and the main radar antenna can still be rotated by hand! The site near Raven, however, will eventually be swallowed up by the ice. A good portion of it is below the snow line, with a wind-sculpted moat surrounding the structure (like the dome at South Pole).

A couple pics here from the window of an LC-130 on the way back from Summit.

I took this one while walking back from the end-of-season party. This hillside is typical of those surrounding Kangerlussuaq.

Three buildings down from the KISS center, there are some recreational facilities. Here, you find Nordlyets (northern lights) restaurant. Some of the VECO folk took the menu, translated it, and made a few copies for the restaurant with a neat photo of auroras over Summit Camp on the cover. It's fairly expensive like everything in Scandinavia, but the food and ambiance were pretty good. The Musk Ox pizza was a highlight for me.

The afternoon after riding back from the ice edge, Jim and I got some beer and sat down on the porch of the KISS building. Soon enough, a full-on bullshit session had evolved. During another afternoon of porch-sitting, I found myself talking to this fellow Trevor who had just returned from the North GRIP site (GRIP = Greenland Icecore Project). Their original goal was to obtain ice cores (which they did) but upon reaching bedrock, they found some sediments mixed in with the ice. This was of such interest to the paleo-biologist types that they extended their work at the site to retrieve more material from underneath the ice cap. Interesting stuff, you know, to get a glimpse of what the interior of Greenland was like before it was covered in ice. One thing that made the news recently was a pine needle found in the sludge. Originally, they thought it was a piece of plywood or something that had fallen in the borehole from above. But upon closer inspection it was an honest-to-god pine needle. Pretty interesting to hear this story first-hand from a guy who was right there at the time. Also, the techniques used by the team are of interest to the Lake Vostok project. The drilling into Lake Vostok (an actual lake underneath the Antarctic ice sheet) has stopped some meters from the lake itself because of concerns of polluting this ancient and pristine environment...and in particular disturbing any possible life that may exist down there. So the Vostok teams can look at what the GRIP guys tried in retrieving their samples - how well it worked or didn't work. Actually, they told me the pressure underneath the glacier actually forced the material up the borehole...so the thought is that probably not too much kerosene (used as a drilling fluid) leaked downward.

A couple miles from the Sondre Stromfjord port, up on a nearby hill, is Kellyville. I believe the reason for the station's name is one Mr. Kelly (John Kelly, if I remember right) who was instrumental in its development. It's a small research station whose main focus is the "incoherent scatter radar" which you see in this picture. The Kangerlussuaq area is positioned right underneath the average auroral oval, making it a great place for ionospheric, high atmosphere, and geomagnetic studies. The radar antenna itself is mounted on an old naval gun turret, and it can move remarkably fast when it's operating. Anyway, Mike arranged a tour of the facility one day so I tagged along with him, Vicky, and Whitney.

One of the site engineers, a fellow from Iceland, showed us around. One interesting stop was this, the control room for the transmit side of the radar. It's an interesting mix of old and new equipment. Outside this room is the power station for the antenna - a 3.5 megawatt device. The power station is straight out of a 50's sci-fi movie, with huge electical-looking gizmos that scream "don't touch". I would imagine working on this stuff is a good application of the phrase "pucker factor". Because it is so powerful, the system actually uses a smaller radar to detect the presence of incoming aircraft. Planes are not supposed to fly over this thing, but inevitably they will...so this smaller radar will shut down the big antenna if a plane comes too close. Same goes for the pair of LIDAR instruments inside the building...they get shut down too. As the tour went on, I noticed some very familiar things...namely a riometer system from U. of Maryland, a magnetometer from U. of New Hampshire/Augsburg College, and a VLF/ELF receiver from Stanford. These systems are the same as those installed at Arrival Heights near McMurdo. The visible (green) LIDAR was also quite similar to the one I operated at the Crary Lab, and a Fabry-Perot interferometer is installed here to look at upper atmosphere wind speed and temperature (similar to the one at Arrival Heights). And in one last posting from the small world department, Allan Weatherwax was on site at the time with a few of his students. I had exchanged a few emails with him from McMurdo about the riometer system last year but never met him. Small world, no?

A funny sign outside the "town", really just the research station itself and some houses for the operating staff and visiting researchers.

After the tour, I got on the bike and rode back to Kangerlussuaq. It was a nice ride, again with splendid weather, but the remarkable thing about it was that I rode the entire length of the longest paved road in Greenland. Yep, it goes from Kangerlussuaq to the port...a whopping 10 miles or so. Here's part of it.

One photo of the port itself here.

Me with the bike.

And back into Kangerlussuaq.