At Martin's next call in, I confirmed that I'd be joining. This was really exciting. Thoughts were already running through my brain. What should I bring? What should I expect on the middle of a Greenland glacier? Would it be cold? Would it be wet, windy, slippery, blinding to the eye? No clue! Camera batteries well charged? You don't want to miss a thing in this once in a lifetime event!
 
Slowly coming off the helideck. Strange feeling as if you're being lifted into the air while sitting on your seat (which is exactly true!). Friends on deck quickly diminishing... it feels weird in my lower tummy.
 
Martin and the scientists are talking into the headsets, communicating to each other, not at all disturbed by the noise of the engine. Through my headset I hear the communication going on, but I can hardly speak a word. My eyes are rolling over the revealing scenery. I try to grasp it all as we gain height. Quickly the Sunrise gets smaller and before I realize we're hanging in mid air 'sliding' away from the ice edge and entering a big unknown white world. My seat is still strangely tilted forward.
 
Not only can I see the white world in front of me, it also rolls away underneath my feet.
 
It feels like we are being sent out to space or to some strange unknown planet. In no time at all we are looking at the immense landscape of Petermann Glacier underneath us. Beautiful white shapes, nothing seems to be flat anymore, all is rounded by shape. The white is undulating, full of hills big and small, all round and softly 'streaming' from one into another. The sunlight strikes along the ice making shades and contours look even prettier. This view is something never to forget. I could never have imagined anything like this! This landscape is so unreal, so unexpected and so unimaginable that my brain goes in a total overload. Handling all of this instant input, understanding these views, grasping it all, it simply cannot be done by unprepared brains! They need to get this picture fed several times in order to settle a bit and to make a kind of blueprint of it. This is just too much!
 
And we are not there yet. Soon my eyes catch hold of an overly bright blue curly shape in the white landscape. Not only a curl, lots of small blue lagoons or ponds seem to be scattered all over this white world.
 
"What's this all about these blue lakes down there", I ask Martin through the headset.
 
He smiles a bit, noticing my astonishment.
 
"These are all freshwater melt lakes, or ponds", he replies in my headphones.
 
But how come they're so overly blue? Not the right time for this question now, we are on our way to one of the scientific measuring locations and the focus needs to be on more important matters now.
 
I don't know how they manage the team finds their way in this landscape, but I guess that seeing enough of it will make you feel at home; that doesn't happen to me yet. Martin earlier explained that his magnetic compass is completely off track here. I know, because onboard we face the same issue. The magnetic north now is now behind us in Northern Canada, while the Geographical North obviously can be found above us at the North Pole.
 
I look around, nothing I can do but to shake my head in disbelief.
 
How can it be, a completely white world covered in sparkly bright blue ponds and blue streams and rivers? These colors do not come naturally... or do they?
 
Clearly, in this world they do... But this blue is so blue, and doesn't look like anything from our 'normal' world!
 

And at the same time the white blanket doesn't look like anything from our world either. Nothing from here does!.
 
Martin carefully puts his 1000kg) Eurocopter on the ground. Jason and Richard jump out to get their tools from of the storage compartment in the back of the heli. I am still sitting kind of flabbergasted. Martin smiles and says something like, "I knew you would be liking this!"
 
Yet, part of my brain must have been alert. My camera was getting red hot this first ride through the air.
 
Carefully I test my grip on the white ground. How will my hiking boots like this white floor? It looks hard and rough. Yes, it is...
 
Carefully, I walk around the chopper while its rotors make their last turns. Rucksacks, steel poles, big battery drill, shiny one-metre-long ice augers, a very familiar looking bucket from the ship filled with loads of orange colored rope and the stainless steel cylinder – the CDT (conductivity, density, temperature) that we have been dropping off the ship's inflatables into the deep ocean so often in the past days. All that looks familiar. We carry the lot over the white world walking down one of the many rounded slopes.
 
Again I'm struck by astonishment. New views keep opening up step after step. And all of a sudden, a blue ink-filled stream pops into sight. Steep straight white icy walls contouring two of these overly blue rivers that seem to come together in a kind of whirlpool! Am I dreaming or is this real? These walls are so weirdly shaped, probably by the years of water running past them, this is unreal.
 
So even at ground level this water still looks blue. The bigger flow coming from the left seems to carry slightly darker blue ink than the smaller one from the right. Surely one can use this 'water' to write a letter home. My god, what a stunning sight!
 
Meanwhile the guys have made their way down to a plateau on the side of the big river. Richard is waiting for the gear I am carrying on my shoulders. They look at me with a bit of a laugh on their faces as if to say: yeah, we know, we have been there too in this state of disbelief. But mind you, you will get used to it.
 
The shiny drill sinks rapidly down into the ice. Over a metre deep. And another one. Steel poles slide into the holes. They'll work as ice anchors. Richard gears up the climbing rope, one end fixed to the poles, the other end goes through a karabiner on his climbing harness. He ties the orange rope to the cylinder, and then lowers himself to the water's with the CDT cylinder under his arm.
 
A bit more rope-knotting and off goes the cylinder into the deep blue icy melt waters right in the middle of this big white expanse. He tells me that this crack (river) goes all the way down through the ice tongue. Later onboard, when the data has been downloaded and processed, he'll be able to see when exactly the conductivity measurements go up in relation to the water depth. This exact point is where the seawater begins and where the ice ends. The measurements he's done up to now show a thickness of about 55 to 60 metres in this area.
 
And yet, the cylinder will make all its way down to the end of the rope at 180 metres or until it touches bottom - although the fjord is supposed to be over 500 metres deep here.
 
Lowering the cylinder takes time; I know that from dropping it from the inflatable out in the open fjord. That gives me the time to explore the world that we have dropped into. We are surrounded by soft rolling white hills with lots of very small and bigger blue lagoons on them. Amazing. The small pools are perfectly round, some shallow, and some more than half a metre deep. The crystal clear water in the pools acts as a lens and on the bottom of each and every pool, there is brownish gravel to be seen. No exception. Looking at the ground, it feels like load of blue eyes with wide, dark pupils are looking at us from the ice world beneath us. I realise that this small pebbly stuff on the pond bottoms must be the reason for the existence of the pools. Would it be so that the sun heats up the brown gravel more than the ice, so the gravel 'sinks' into the ice and ultimately forms a small round pool?
 
Later Jason confirms these thoughts. This brown 'stuff' (cryoconite) is simply dirt blown from the high rocky walls, mixed with cosmic dust from space, and carbon pollution created by burning fossil fuels, that drops down from the atmosphere, and it all collects on the ice.
 
Coming back to Richard, Jason and Martin, I see them standing below me besides the blue river. Martin smoking his pipe, Jason & Richard discussing their work. It is time to bring up the big heavy sensor. This time not by arm power, but by walking the rope over the ice. The sensor will follow. Clever.
 
Two of us walking off, one on middle height to communicate between the parties and the last one keeping an eye on where the line dips into the water.
 
Hoisting is so much easier so! It's a heavy thing, over 25kg.
 
When all is done, signals are exchanged over the 175 or so metres. On the waterfront, Richard pulls out an electrical device from the cylinder to inform the device that the end of its measuring session has come. We walk back and the orange rope goes back into the big bucket. The steel poles are pulled up from the ice, we get all the stuff and say goodbye to this magical place we have named Whirlpool One. If one was to design a swimming pool in one's imagination, this might be an idea.
The heli is packed again and the blue eyes in the white tablecloth quickly get smaller again. In the headset I hear the guys talking about their next stop. Martin pushes the handles and foot peddles to keep his green firefly 'afloat' and to move in the right direction.
 
We fly over even larger cracks, one so wide that it has turned into a wide dark river cutting the ice tongue in half, or so it seems.
 
"Isn't that incredible", I ask the guys through my headset.
 
Jason responds, "yeah, this is one of the cracks that is widening up and which will cause the glacier to break up. Similar thing happened last year when a part, the size of Manhattan got cut off and got separated of the main ice field. It left Hall Bay and a year later, one third of that particular ice field still moves along the South East coast of Canada".
 
We are witnessing unprecedented changes in the Arctic, Petermann is just one dramatic example. It certainly is something to worry about, that's why we are here.
 
Last stop we make is high on the edge of the cliffs. One would never guess that the cliffs are 1000 metres or more, I'm probably (mis)led by the enormity of the sizes here and lack of detail that causes me to make big mistakes in judging distances and heights.
 
Once the heli lands on the cliff, I make my way to the edge. It is high. Again I would never believe it's a thousand metres though.
 
Jason is busy on the cliff edge with the camera that he rigged up two weeks ago. The stills camera is taking minute-by-minute photo shots of the floating ice tongue below to bear witness any changes occurring. In combination with the GPS units on various places on the ice and cameras on the walls of the fjord, all movements of the larger parts of the glacier are monitored. Some of this data is actually instantly sent out and received by the scientists on board the ship Thus while here in the area, we can keep a close eye on the movement of the Petermann Glacier.
 
Again the views are stunning. Deep down below, we can see a tiny little green boat glued between the dark blue sea and the shiny white ice It is seven at night, sun high up in the sky sending heat rays down to us. It will not settle these summer days. We lie on the warm rock floor looking down into the fjord while Jason does his work to the camera.
 
We chat, we gaze, and we feel happy. Richard shows us plant-deriving fossils in the limestone rock we're sitting on. Once all this rock body was ocean bedding he explains. It has taken millions of ocean years to make this rock into such a thick limestoney crust. And again it has taken millions of years for it to lift itself up after the massive ice pack on its back had melted. Now it gives shape to the white frozen world far below us still carrying traces of sea bottom of millions of years ago.
 
Amazing afternoon this was. Mind lifting.
 
- Bob

Photos © Greenpeace/Nick Cobbing