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Post by Sleeping Bag Man! on Apr 12, 2016 22:09:54 GMT -8
Greenland Mankini Tour 2016!!
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BlueBear
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Post by BlueBear on Apr 13, 2016 2:33:50 GMT -8
Weather is a fickle thing of course, but if the Spring and Summer continue like they have been, watch out. We're potentially in for another big one. We shall see. Can this weather impede, or even postpone or cancel your research trip? Not quite, as Tigger noted our flight dates (especially for the C130's) are set months in advance, and those planes can still land & take off with surface melt happening. We can still drive around when it's soft and wet, even if camping in it is less fun. But it could limit the amount of science we do. The drilling guys will need to be extra careful... we'll need an experienced hand running the power head to feel when it's getting "sticky" in the hole to avoid losing our warm drill, irrevocably stuck down a cold borehole. We may have to make the call to stop drilling, or just settle for shallow boreholes this year. We shall see. That would also complicate our permeability experiments planned this year. It complicates all the science, honestly. The majority of our work is supposed to happen at below freezing temps, hence going to Greenland in April instead of July. It's still far too early to make calls like that, though, and weather is fickle. But it melted again yesterday accross SW Greenland, and the lowest elevation zones along the margins are already at bare ice in mid April, confirmed by Worldview satellite images yesterday. Local sources have confirmed the river is already starting to run high this Spring. Which is just stupid, seriously. I have a very, very bad gut feeling about this. I know better than to fully trust such predictive feelings, but at least so far the data coincides. We will have our campaign regardless, but we will see what it is we end up really studying this year. We'll just need to roll with it. - Mike |
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BlueBear
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Post by BlueBear on Apr 13, 2016 3:29:16 GMT -8
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amaruq
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Post by amaruq on Apr 13, 2016 5:44:48 GMT -8
That's strange, something sounds an awful lot like foreboding in here...
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tigger
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Post by tigger on Apr 13, 2016 7:01:59 GMT -8
That's strange, something sounds an awful lot like foreboding in here... The foreboding can only happen after we get off the ice. |
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Post by Sleeping Bag Man! on Apr 13, 2016 10:30:50 GMT -8
So if the drilling is seriously disrupted, is there enough other science to do?
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BlueBear
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Post by BlueBear on Apr 13, 2016 11:36:00 GMT -8
There's actually plenty of work to do, yeah. We have fully 4 separate projects/experiments running simultaneously on this Spring campaign (two more of you count the 2nd half of our crew staying at Dye-2), it's quite likely we'll only get to maybe 75% of it in the time we have. It really just depends on the weather.
And it would (probably?) only affect our lowest sites directly. It gets noticeably colder the further up you go, and we're traversing all the way up & over the divide, so unless the melt keeps ramping up this bat-s*** crazily (and it won't, I think??), it'd still be plenty cold at our higher sites.
But still. This was not expected, not *this early* in the season. We'll see.
- Mike
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Post by Sleeping Bag Man! on Apr 13, 2016 11:37:33 GMT -8
OK cool. Well good luck.
Hoping for good science!
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Image Credit / Coolkat
