Grønland

It’s happened- the first crossed out O to appear in a title. Likely won’t happen again because I have to copy/paste it from Wikipedia seeing as my keyboard is limited to the 26 English letters. Went to that winter wonderland last week and it did not disappoint.

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Not the warmest place I’ve been (certainly the coldest, in fact), but that didn’t matter quite as much when bundled up in a green polar jumpsuit that provided about 10 inches of full body padding. We came for the ice cores, we stayed for the amazing headfirst sliding down icy walls and snow-covered mountains.

This was for the DIS signature trip, the “long study tour”, meaning that myself and my 18 core course buddies landed in the thriving metropolis of Kangerlussuaq, Greenland on Monday morning and were trapped there until the sweet sound of the seatbelt sign turning off on Friday morning. The class is a case study of Greenland, taught by two ice core-ologists who were our personal guides on this educational playground tour.

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Those dogs and a few others pulled us around a frozen fjord for a few hours, our bodies thankful for the full-body seal suit that was lent to us. Dinners were a spectacle as well, as we were lucky enough to immerse ourselves in Greenlandic cuisine- all sorts of freshly caught fish, a couple types of whale, musk ox, and reindeer. In between, we saw the edge of the Greenland Ice Sheet (GRIS), the massive polar cap the covers about 90% of the 5-Texas sized island. One afternoon brought us to the top of the ice sheet, after following the longest road in Greenland (70 km). From there we were able to practice ice-core drilling and take some surface level samples to later test the age of the trapped air back in Copenhagen.

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And hey! Check out that machine! Seven crazy dudes have it locked away in their evil laboratory outside of Kangerlussuag. They are mostly occupied with tracking the Northern Lights (yea saw those too), but this machine was about all I could comprehend from the visit, although it entirely blows my mind. It clicks about once a second, but at a seemingly random pace. Each click is (allegedly) the sound of lightning striking the earth. Anywhere. On the whole planet. It has some radio signal that allows it to pick up a lightning strike nearly simultaneously from anywhere on the globe. Holy moly.

To the statue:

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