Cargo

This morning I awoke to a soft cool rain blowing against our window. Standing out on the back door , facing the river, I could hear the distinct song of the arctic snow bunting, sweet in comparison to the croaking bark of the ravens. For the first time in over a week I have had time now to sit and enter some thoughts. The past days have been full of cargo planes coming and going, some leaving cargo to be further assimilated and sent elsewhere by commercial air, some needing additional pay loads from us, which we had already prepared, and finally the Piece De Resistance, a C5 Galaxy cargo carrier, one of the world's largest cargo planes landed Monday afternoon with close to 200 000 pounds of cargo.
Originally designed to transport close to a million pounds of cargo, the C5 has had to cut back on it's payload due to age and repairs now made prohibitive due to lack of replaceable parts, still, with both fore and aft cargo openings (the nose lifts open like the jaw of a shark) this six story high, football field long air plane is truly remarkable to behold. Working around it causes one to feel very very small like a mote of dust before a star.
We added a few pallets of cargo to the behemoth and this went off without a hitch, which was very pleasing to us, as there had been some very late nights reworking palletized cargo for other lifts on LC 130s. The cargo aboard the C5 was divided between the new tractors and gear needed for the inland traverse from Thule on the NW coast to Summit, and for NEEM, a Danish drilling project located halfway between the points just mentioned.
The goal of the traverse is to prove that it can be done. Already proven in the Antarctic by the South Pole Traverse team, traversing of fuel and supplies seems to be the answer to the rising cost of fuel while also helping to diminish the carbon foot print of operating LC 130s for all of our cargo needs. Already employed in places such as Summit and more often, at smaller field sites, are wind generators and solar panels, but neither of these are yet up to the capacity required to supply enough of the load demanded at places such as Summit.
The NEEM drilling project is hoping to drill to a depth well over 2500 meters over the next three years. The knowledge gained, if successful, from these ice cores will provide the first record of what the earth's climate was like during the last inter glacial period (known as the Eemian)almost 130 000 years BP. Although similar drilling projects have occurred at diffirent sites on the Greenland ice cap, none of these have been able to produce ungarbled Eemian ice. Garbled ice being sedimentary layers of a glacier marbled by bedrock, melt water from the residual core heat of the earth, and friction from the ice cap, etc etc..at any rate I am doing my best to research this one and will keep you abreast of my findings.
Basically, the knowledge from this core, which will be the first of its type will give very clean, very pure climate signals from the onset of the last interglacial period which will deeply enhance "our" abilities to create more accurate climate models predicting the extent of temperature elevations, sea level gain and ice cap and glacial melt.
It is really, very exciting, and the traverse team, known as GRIT (Greenland inland traverse) will be passing through NEEM's camp in mid June; a further boon for a more carbon friendly cargo re supply opportunity over the next few years. The NEEM site does have a ski way capable of landing LC 130s, similar to the one used at Summit, Raven and other places in the Arctic and Antarctic supplied by skied "birds".
Our time here is moving as fast as the cargo we ship and at times, is just as challenging to keep track of. The research being done here in Greenland is amazing and by the end of the day I sometimes find my head spinning with ideas both concerning my work as well as trying to conceptualize at least some, of what the people, whose cargo I am handling, so easily understand.
This work is both an education and juggling act. A logistical arena of comedies and concerns and wonders. The moments of stillness which are special and rare, find the landscape slowly turning towards spring. Brief chances of getting away into the hills are snatched like the treasures they are. We remind ourselves of where we are and what we are doing by pausing on a hill, far above the runway town, to stare at an antler dropped last year by a caribou laying upon a boulder. Moving water is suddenly heard. A narrow slip of melting snow cuts its way down to the river already widening, racing toward the fjord.