The Quest for the North Pole: Bonus Episode 4 – Live from Greenland

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I stand 750 miles north of the Arctic Circle, at the very location where explorers set out on their daring expeditions to reach the North Pole over a century ago.

Before me stretches the vast Greenland Ice Sheet, the second-largest ice formation in the world after Antarctica. A pristine blanket of snow covers it, rising steadily from my position all the way to the horizon, where it merges with a thick layer of clouds. Behind me, the barren landscape slopes gently towards the sea, dotted with small icebergs. The only signs of human activity are a few shacks and a gravel road leading to the U.S. military’s Thule Air Base, located behind a cluster of hills about 18 miles away.

From where I stand, it’s easy to imagine that not much has changed since the days of the great explorers. But the climate records tell a different story—they reveal a dramatic shift. The Greenland Ice Sheet is now losing 280 gigatonnes of ice every year, a direct result of a warming planet.

A metric gigatonne equals 1 billion tonnes. So, 280 billion tonnes of ice loss is equivalent to over 5 million Titanics worth of ice.

It’s difficult to grasp the scale of such an enormous impact. That’s exactly why I’m here: I’ve joined two scientists from the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS), who have invited me to observe how they collect data that forecasts the future of the ice sheet—and by extension, our future.

Glaciologist William Colgan and electrical engineer Christopher Shields are tethered to sleds packed with sensors, tools, and heavy boxes of lead batteries—each one heavier than I am. Despite the six inches of soft snow, we wear crampons over our waterproof boots. Our goal is to reach an ice sheet monitoring station 1500 meters away, all uphill. I have the least demanding role, trailing behind while the others haul the sledges in the old-school, 19th-century explorer style. But even so, I find myself gasping for breath in the frigid, dry air, navigating terrain as slippery as a sand dune.

Over a century ago, explorers like Fridtjof Nansen and Robert Peary ventured across this very ice sheet in Greenland. Their expeditions pushed the limits of both geography and human endurance. As I struggle up the icy incline in Chris’s sled tracks, I begin to appreciate the immense physical challenges they must have faced on their journeys.

Our task may not be as physically demanding, but it holds perhaps even greater significance. Liam and Chris are replacing the environmental sensors at the monitoring station and downloading two years' worth of data from the ice sheet. This information is critical for understanding the current state of the ice sheet and predicting potential future catastrophes if we fail to take action against climate change.

From Mytour and iHeartRadio, you're tuned into the Quest for the North Pole. I'm your host, Kat Long, science editor at Mytour, and this is our final bonus episode: Live from Greenland.

Reaching this isolated part of Greenland was an adventure in itself. After flying from New York to Copenhagen with a stop in Reykjavik and completing three negative COVID tests, I met Liam and Chris at the airport the next morning. We boarded an Air Greenland flight to Kangerlussuaq, the country's main international hub. From there, we transferred to a smaller aircraft bound for Thule Air Base, located about 950 miles from the North Pole. This base would serve as our research headquarters for the week.

From the window of the plane, the desolate expanse of western Greenland stretched out beneath me. In the southwest, countless lakes dotted the glacier-carved rocks. A little further north, we flew past the Jakobshavn ice field, one of the world’s fastest-moving glaciers, which seemed to scatter icebergs across the sea. The landscape transitioned from rugged, weathered rock to snow-covered hills, eventually leading us to the Greenland Ice Sheet, which blanketed the land except for a narrow, flat strip along the coastline. That’s our destination.

Knud Rasmussen, a Danish-Greenlandic explorer, immortalized with a bronze bust at Kangerlussuaq airport, linked this region to the ancient tales of Thule when he established a trading post here in 1910 [PDF]. Long before that, this area served as a gathering point for people and ideas. Waves of Arctic settlers made the short journey across Baffin Bay from modern-day Canada to Greenland between 2500 BCE and 1200 CE. 

They encountered a treeless land rich with food sources, thanks to the convergence of Arctic, Atlantic, and glacial waters. The seas are teeming with marine life, ranging from tiny fish to massive walruses, as well as Arctic foxes and musk oxen—common sights during my visit. The abundant wildlife supported a settlement nestled at the foot of a tall, flat-topped mesa, both named Uummannaaq, meaning 'heart-shaped.'

In earlier episodes of The Quest for the North Pole, we discussed how John Ross and William Edward Parry were the first European explorers to meet the Inughuit here in 1818. Over the next century, many more explorers and whalers anchored near Uummannaaq. In 1849, HMS North Star arrived on a mission to resupply ships searching for the missing Franklin expedition. The North Star was trapped in ice, forcing its crew to winter just offshore, giving its captain, James Saunders, plenty of time to name the surrounding landmarks. Today, you can find North Star Bay, Saunders Island, and Mount Dundas, the British name for the mesa, on modern maps.

Robert Peary established his headquarters in this region during his attempts to reach the North Pole, although his main camp at Etah was located about 140 miles north of Uummannaaq. Knud Rasmussen resided in Uummannaaq while managing the trading post and carrying out his seven Thule Expeditions across the polar wilderness between 1912 and 1933. His colleague Peter Freuchen’s house still stands among the small cluster of colorful shacks on the edge of North Star Bay.

When I visited the village—now commonly referred to as Dundas—it was eerily silent. In fact, it had been abandoned. In the 1950s, the U.S. military relocated the 27 families who had lived there to a new settlement 60 miles to the north, as the Americans were building a top-secret air base on the opposite side of the bay.

It was known as Operation Blue Jay.

At the peak of the Cold War, the U.S. invested heavily in constructing air bases to form a network of defenses against the Soviet Union. Since the Soviets could potentially launch ballistic missiles over the North Pole to strike the U.S., American military officials recognized the need for an Arctic-based system to detect those missiles. After securing agreements with NATO and Denmark, which governed Greenland, the U.S. Army initiated Operation Blue Jay in 1951 to build Thule Air Base.

More than 7,000 construction workers and engineers left Norfolk, Virginia, to build the base, but the mission was so secret that they didn’t even know their destination. The Thule airstrip opened in September, followed by sled-dog patrol units and much more. The specially designed construction materials were so durable that most of the barracks and offices—known as 'flattops'—at Thule today are the original 1950s structures.

In 1952, the military revealed Operation Blue Jay to the public. A few years later, the U.S. built nearby camps to test cold-weather defense and nuclear technology. One such camp was Camp TuTO, an acronym for 'Thule Take-Off.'

Camp TuTO functioned as a staging area for transporting equipment to Camp Century, a nuclear reactor base dug deep into the ice sheet, located 100 miles inland.

Jim Fennell: They were red plywood buildings with snow all around them. One would serve as the mess hall, another as the latrine, and yet another as the library. The library was quite something.

That’s Jim Fennell. He trained as a weather observer in the Army and served at Camp TuTO in 1962 and 1963.

Kat Long: What were your responsibilities during your weather observations? Jim Fennell: There was a standard sheet we had to complete every hour, which included details like temperature, wind speed, direction, and then we'd head out to estimate cloud heights, types, and visibility. All of this was done, of course, without the radar or advanced tools that are available today. The only mechanical devices we had were the wind speed and direction gauges, which looked like little airplanes that would spin around, with the results printed out at the weather station. The one thing that stands out the most to me is when I recorded the lowest temperature for 1962, which was -63 at Camp Century.

That’s minus 63 degrees Fahrenheit. By documenting the weather conditions at Camps TuTO and Century, Jim became a part of the earliest organized climate research in this region of the Arctic.

Jim Fennell: To me, it was more of an adventure. I didn’t get to visit Germany or travel through Europe, but at least I got a small break from always staying in the U.S.

These camps were abandoned about a decade after their construction. The Army dismantled the red buildings at Camp TuTO, but left behind the long gravel road from Thule Air Base that led to the edge of the ice sheet.

And that’s where I found myself in September 2021, bouncing in the backseat of a red pickup truck, with Liam driving, Chris in the passenger seat, and sea shanties blasting from the stereo.

The terrain stretched out in front of me, bulldozed to gather material for the road. The light dusting of snow gave the barren brown land a sugar-coated appearance. As we neared the end of the road, the edge of the ice sheet emerged into view. The gently sloping ice mountain melted into a slushy lake on one side of the road. On the other, the ice had receded, leaving behind a field of rounded rocks. The remnants of the road to Camp Century rose about 150 feet above the ice sheet's surface. Though no longer safe to travel, we used the old ramp as a reference point during our slippery hike up to the ice-monitoring site.

The station isn’t a building or a large structure. Instead, it’s a tall steel tripod with a T-shaped metal bar, outfitted with sensors to measure wind speed, air temperature, solar radiation, and snow depth. Two additional sensor arrays were placed within the ice to monitor temperature and pressure at various depths. These sensors connect to a box, which Chris calls the station’s brain, and the data is transmitted by satellite to the internet. Anyone can access the status of the Greenland ice sheet in real time.

This station works in tandem with another identical one located higher up on the ice sheet. Together, the eight pairs of stations scattered across Greenland form the backbone of GEUS’s Program for Monitoring the Greenland Ice Sheet, also known as PROMICE, as Liam explains.

Liam Colgan: These stations, one situated lower and the other higher, are designed to measure ice and climate parameters. Essentially, we’re capturing the key data we need to understand how the ice sheet is reacting to climate change. We need to measure all the factors that are critical to a climate model, like temperature, pressure, and ice movement. Our goal is to capture these in the real world, out in situ, so we can compare the real-time data with what our models predict.

No one had visited this station since May 2019—thanks to the coronavirus! Liam and Chris had to lay the entire station on its side to swap out the sensors, which meant digging the tripod out from a year and a half’s worth of ice accumulation. Each sensor had to be unscrewed from its mount and replaced. Tangled masses of frozen wires had to be untangled, no easy task in 17-degree weather with snow blowing sideways, just like it was during our visit.

Liam Colgan: This is why your fingers freeze so quickly when you're doing detailed work, like splicing wires and then trying to secure the cap or tighten screws. A task that should take minutes can easily stretch to 45 minutes of troubleshooting and rework.

The effort is worthwhile for glaciologists like Liam, as it provides valuable insight into the ice sheet’s mass balance—an essential measure of how much mass the ice sheet gains from snowfall and loses through melting or iceberg calving.

Liam Colgan: The goal is to understand the mass balance—how the inputs and outputs change over time and space—so we can track the health of the ice sheet today and in recent years. By analyzing the climate projections provided by the UN, we can examine different climate pathways and predict how the ice sheet will evolve under each one, using our current knowledge of these processes. Kat Long: And what is the current health of the ice sheet? Liam Colgan: The ice sheet is in a state of continuous decline. It has a negative mass balance, which means that the loss of ice through melting and iceberg calving far exceeds the accumulation from snowfall. As the climate continues to warm, this imbalance worsens, leading to more melting.

Do you remember the 5 million Titanic-sized amounts of ice lost every year that I mentioned earlier in our story?

Liam Colgan: That’s roughly equivalent to 8,000 to 9,000 metric tons per second—an almost unimaginable number. But if you think of it as thousands of tons of ice lost every single second, around the clock and throughout the year, it starts to put it into perspective.

All this ice loss is altering gravity itself. As Greenland sheds ice, it becomes lighter, reducing its gravitational pull. This means it can no longer hold ocean waters as close as before. These waters now spread out across the Earth, affecting regions thousands of kilometers away, far beyond the poles.

One of the most astonishing consequences of Greenland’s ice loss is the process known as “post-glacial rebound.” For countless centuries, Greenland’s land has been compressed under the immense weight of the ice sheet. However, as the ice sheet melts and lightens, the land below it rises. Near the swiftly moving Jakobshavn glacier, the bedrock has now risen 10 feet above sea level since 1900, which is 10 times the average rebound. Other glaciers in Greenland have experienced about a foot of rebound in the same period, which is still quite significant.

Reflecting on how much Greenland has changed, I couldn’t help but think about how the experiences of explorers in the past differed so much from mine. The glaciers, icebergs, and snowpack they encountered no longer exist. The Greenland Ice Sheet near the TuTO road now ends in a lake instead of solid land.

The fact that I, a typical New Yorker, could visit this remote part of the world signified how much things had changed. Gone were the days of sea boots and woolen mittens; we now wore layers of down and fleece. Instead of hauling heavy sledges over the ice, we only carried the necessary equipment for each day. And rather than spending months or years in the Arctic wilderness, we returned to the air base’s hotel each evening and even enjoyed a beer at the Top of the World Club, the local bar.

Liam Colgan: Our days were demanding, grueling, and relentless. The cold and wind made them even more taxing. But if you think back nearly a century, it’s clear how much we have now – with Gore-Tex and goggles, it’s a whole different experience. I can't imagine what it must have been like to haul sledges across the ice sheet in conditions colder than a full polar summer. It must have been incredibly difficult. Kat Long: I was bundled up in layers, covering nearly every inch of my body for the whole week. Despite all the research and historical study I’ve done on the Arctic, this was my first actual visit. I survived, and I didn’t even have to eat pemmican, so it wasn’t too bad. Liam Colgan: By Arctic standards, this was the first week that snow started to accumulate on the ice sheet, so last week it was still Arctic summer. Now, with single-digit negative temperatures, it’s starting to feel cooler. Kat Long: I noticed throughout our time in Greenland, you never once wore a scarf. How is that possible? Liam Colgan: I didn’t pack one. It was colder than I expected, but not cold enough to need a scarf.

This trip, to me, was the final chapter of the story of the Quest for the North Pole. I had the opportunity to witness the severe impacts of climate change on a region that explorers once believed would remain frozen for eternity. It underscored the reality that what happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay there; its fate is intrinsically tied to our own.

The Quest for the North Pole is hosted by yours truly, Kat Long.

This episode was researched and written by me, with fact-checking by Austin Thompson. The Executive Producers are Erin McCarthy and Tyler Klang, while the Supervising Producer is Dylan Fagan. The show is edited by Dylan Fagan.

A special thanks to Jim Fennell, Liam Colgan, and Chris Shields.

For transcripts, a glossary, and additional details about this episode, head over to Mytour.com/podcast.

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