By Margie Graham, '04
I stepped off the plane into the -10 degree wind and thought to myself, "what am I doing here?" I pulled the fur-lined hood of my parka closer; we were required to dress in our warmest gear for the flight in case the plane crashed and we were stranded on the glacier - a cheerful thought. I wondered how I was going to make it through three weeks of being perpetually cold.
The island of Greenland is covered by one huge glacier excepting areas near the coast that are ice-free. After a two-hour flight aboard an army cargo plane, strapped into a webbed seat with my feet resting on the pallets of our gear in front of me, we were at the very top of the glacier. This NSF science camp, appropriately named Summit, was where I would be working for the next three weeks with my WISP mentor, Dr. Mary Albert of CRREL (Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory). A term spent analyzing snow samples in her lab had led to an invitation to work with her in the field. I left the sweltering heat of sophomore summer in Hanover, NH, for Summit, Greenland, where the temperature never gets above zero.
Luckily, my body soon adjusted to the temperature change, and I realized that Greenland summers aren't really any colder than Hanover winters. Of course, I don't spend the winter in a tent, but my massive cocoon of a sleeping bag was more than warm enough. By the third day I had shed my CRREL-issued parka and snowpants for clothing that allowed more freedom of movement than a slow waddle. This cold Greenland summer does have one distinct advantage over the warmth of Hanover - 24-hour sunlight - and all-nighters quickly became far less painful!
Once the initial orientation was over and I got used to one-minute showers every four days, I started enjoying the experience. There was the pure beauty of the place: stepping out of the tent in the morning and seeing the delicate rime crystals that had formed on the rope; the glitter of "diamond dust", an apt description of snow particles hanging in the air that were caught by the sun; the occasional "sun dog", a rainbowed halo around the sun; and the vastness of snow that stretched uninterrupted for thousands of miles.
There was also the intellectual excitement of being there. Mary's research examines the physical properties of snow in an effort to better determine its interaction with the atmosphere. Ice core interpretation has given us important information about the Earth's climate history, and understanding the extent to which yearly layers of snow can reveal the chemistry of the atmosphere at the time they were deposited is important to this area of research. I helped with Mary's research and also carried out an experiment on snow permeability as an Independent Study for class credit.
Though I haven't continued with this research, it was in no way a wasted experience. I had always been interested in science and had chosen an Earth Sciences major, but I knew that there was a large gap between my experience as a classroom scientist and the lifestyle that I would be choosing as a research scientist. The work might have seemed tedious to an outside observer - cutting cylinders of snow and recording air flow through them, or injecting tracer gas into snow and pulling syringes of air at different times to see how the gas diffused through the snow. But, there was something present in this work that had been missing from all the labs I'd ever done; that was a sense of discovery. We were doing this research because we were genuinely unsure of what was occurring, and we were hoping to discover and accurately describe the processes at work. Every night, the whole team - including two atmospheric chemists and Mary's graduate students - would gather to discuss both the day's results and how we needed to change the parameters of the experiment for tomorrow. It was real science, science on the fly, and I loved it.
