Larry Mayer had a flight to catch that he did not want to miss. It was the first in a series of airplane rides that would transport him all the way from New Hampshire to a previously unexplored part of the Arctic circle called Victoria Fjord. “No ship has ever been there before,” said Mayer, 72, a professor and director of the Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping at the University of New Hampshire, speaking by phone a half hour before his departure.
To get there, he first had to fly from Boston to Copenhagen, then catch a connecting flight to Stockholm, where a Swedish military plane would transport Mayer to a US Air Force Base in northern Greenland. Finally, from there, Mayer would catch the Oden — a 354-foot icebreaker ship, capable of cutting through about 6 feet of ice. Advertisement He is one of 40 researchers from six countries joining a research expedition that departed in early August and is scheduled to return in mid-September.
Since the 1970s, Mayer estimates that he’s been to the Arctic about 17 times — and a handful of those he was aboard this same vessel. This time, he’s carrying a flag from The Explorer’s Club with him, a symbol of the contribution to exploration and science. Once aboard the icebreaker, Mayer said the journey could get tricky near the top of Greenland in the Lincoln Sea due to some of the last remaining vestiges of the thickest sea ice in the Arctic — up to 20 feet thick.
Mayer said a team monitors ice conditions from a satellite, and they send a helicopter ahead to scout for cracks in the ice. “It looks like we should be able to make it, but you never know,” he said. Curious onlookers can track the ship’s progress online .
The ship is equipped with an ice knife and water jets that can lubricate its hull, and it can rock back and forth to break through thick ice. Such thick ice takes multiple years to accumulate and it has decreased significantly in the Arctic as a result of global warming — a phenomenon Mayer is investigating during the trip. By studying fjords, Mayer is trying to understand why the Greenland ice sheet is melting so quickly, outpacing expectations set by scientific modeling.
Advertisement Most fjords have an underwater ridge at their entrance, according to Mayer. His prior research found warm water from the Atlantic could enter fjords whose ridges were very deep, while taller ridges keep the warm water out, preserving the ice for longer and in some cases even allowing it to grow. On this trip he’s planning to use robot vehicles that can map the seafloor and the ice front to study the melting.
That information can help improve scientific modeling to more accurately predict sea level rise. “Right now, the Greenland ice sheet is the biggest contributor to sea level rise,” Mayer said. Communities along New Hampshire’s Seacoast are already bracing for that change and trying to prepare for it.
In the Arctic, the ship is Mayer’s home away from home, which he described as safe and comfortable, with good food and even a few saunas. Another scientist on board, Liz Weidner, a professor at the University of Connecticut, wrote in a blog that the food is one way researchers differentiate one day from the next during the 24 hours of relentless daylight. The comforts on the ship are in contrast to the outdoors, which Mayer called “rough and tumble and cold.
” Temperatures hover around zero degrees, even in the summer, and expeditions onto the ice can be dangerous. The team has already had a few exciting encounters, according to an expedition blog that said the crew spotted a female polar bear with two cubs walking on the ice on Aug. 10.
Two days later they reached Hans Island in the middle of the Nares Strait. And, on Aug. 14 , another update said the group had reached the mouth of the Victoria Fjord, where they saw a narwhal during an ice reconnaissance flight by helicopter.
Advertisement Expedition coordinator,Åsa Lindgren wrote that after reporting the sighting to Greenland authorities, they learned it was the farthest north a narwhal sighting had ever been made in Greenland. And, she said, the next day excitement was even higher when they spotted a group of about 50 narwhals. “To me, it is just one of the most spectacularly beautiful places I’ve ever seen,” Mayer said.
“I’ve spent 80 months at sea probably in my life, and I love being at sea and I love being on the ocean.” Amanda Gokee can be reached at amanda.gokee@globe.
com . Follow her @amanda_gokee ..
