Photos:Dustin Solberg/Alaska Newspapers

Icebergs at the Jakobshavn Glacier.

Professor Stephen Warren studies black carbon in a lab at the Kangerlussuaq International Science Suppport building.

Icebergs at the Jakobshavn Glacier.

Today, my day began in a lab where University of Washington Professor Stephen Warren is completing his season’s work. He’s preparing snow samples collected here for his studies of snow albedo.

Learn this word: Albedo. It is the measure of the sun’s reflection from the surface of the earth. In the Arctic, albedo is a significant factor in climate change.

Many Alaskans understand this, as it’s one additional reason for concern as the sea ice is now retreating earlier than in the past.

In this little lab of white tile walls, Warren has a stack of quart Mason jars. Each is full of snow from taken from a specific depth at a remote study site.

After melting the snow in a regular microwave oven, he filters out a contaminant that is invisible to the naked eye: soot, or black carbon. This soot originates in the bowels of coal-burning power plants and boreal forest fires. Once it enters the atmosphere, it travels a considerable distance, and some is deposited in the snow atop Greenland’s Ice Sheet.

Snow reflects about 80 percent of the sun’s light -- less if soot is present in even small amounts. For purposes of comparison, tundra and the ocean reflect about 20 percent and 7 percent, respectively.

It’s important to monitor these infinitesimally small -- smaller than 0.4 microns in diameter -- particles because they affect the snow surface albedo. His work has also included snow samples from Alaska’s Arctic. I’ll be writing about this more later in the Alaska Newspapers.

Feeling like ‘Greenland’

The ice sheet is miles away now, and the landscape actually suggests the name of this Arctic nation. Tundra here is lush, blueberries are ripe, and songbirds -- snow buntings, a lark and a species of sparrow -- flit about the willow and rock.

What is surprising to me is that the warmest days of my summer have been here in Kanger, as it’s called.

This is a former U.S. military base now turned over to Greenlandic Home Rule. A sort of village of Inuit and Danes has sprung up around its runway, which runs lengthwise in this glacial valley of scraped rock and gray glacial flour. Much of the military infrastructure remains, including a bowling alley, a gymnasium with a maple floor, barracks and the ubiquitous tank farm.

There are new dwellings painted in the Technicolor colors typical of Greenland villages and plenty of sled dogs tied to stakes.

A steepled red Lutheran church stands out from the concrete Musk Ox Inn and a number of unlabeled concrete buildings.

When I arrived here, fresh from Summit, I still wore the Sorel boots appropriate for single-degree temperatures. Here, temperatures must be in the 70s, though it’s possible that my own personal thermostat needs to be “recalibrated” after a summer interlude atop the ice. Perhaps 60 degrees only feels like 70.

After landing, one of the first people I saw was walking down the street shirtless.

This is unusually warm for the Greenland coast, and I think it is safe to say that climatologists will take note of this year’s warm days on the coast and increased snowfall at the Summit -- two trends consistent with climate modelers’ predictions.

Photos:Dustin Solberg/Alaska Newspapers

University of Alaska Anchorage graduate student Matt Rogers demonstrates how he monitors respiration -- and carbon dioxide output -- at his north Greenland study site.

North Mountain near Thule Air Base is obscured by a series of lenticular clouds.

Summit Camp.

The Jakobshavn Glacier is the world's fastest flowing glacier. It is an example of how the water contained in the Greenland Ice Sheet threatens to raise sea levels as temperatures rise.

Sensitive instruments record carbon dioxide levels in a study of carbon flux in tundra soils in northern Greenland.

The Big House at 10,660 feet atop the Greenland Ice Sheet is the hub of operations at this remote research outpost.

Morning at Summit Camp is awash in sunlight.

With a six-kilowatt wind turbine, Summit Camp is beginning to diversify its energy supply.

Professor H.A.J. Meijer is investigating a question of snow chemistry in an effort to better interpret the climate information contained within ice cores.

Many of the basic chores at the Summit Camp required the use of snowmachines and sleds. The newest machines in the camp fleet use four-stroke engines. A prototype snowmachine designed by students at Michigan Tech University used an uncommon energy source: electricity.

Keep your gloves on: In extreme conditions that are not uncommon on the Greenland Ice Sheet, exposing bare skin to the elements can cause frostbite. With this in mind, even a simple zipper pull may save people who spend long hours outside from unnecessary exposure.

A Greenland arctic fox takes a curious side look at a photographer sharing its barren tundra.

Above: Vermilion tents offer a bright contrast to the monochromatic look of snow and sky on the ice sheet surrounding Summit Camp in Greenland.
Photo:Dustin Solberg/Alaska Newspapers

When I turned in last night at half past 11, the evening fog had enveloped the camp and the air had turned crystalline. It seemed like snow might fall by morning.

But this morning, when I awoke at 6 a.m. and stepped outside, the fog had lifted. There was no new snow.

The sky was blue with only a few high clouds. The night’s fog had brought some hoarfrost that, in the bright morning sun, gave a shimmer to everything: from the village of tents, to the fleet of snowmachines, to the array of flags marking pathways and science sites atop the ice.

Summit Camp is a bustling place, especially during the high season of research work earlier in the summer. But morning comes quietly, gently.

The staff of less than a couple dozen fixes breakfast for themselves in a corner of the big house -- the one building where most things seem to happen in the camp.

This morning, I prepare for the departure from the 10,660-foot Summit Camp. Written on the whiteboard, it reads, “12:00 Leave Summit.”

It’s an amazingly remote place, but considering that we now sit atop the 2-mile high summit, the camp is comfortable. It seems like a normal building in many ways. But there are details that suggest otherwise: the roof hatch, for those days when the snow drifts above the doors.

Buildings are warm, and the collection of paperbacks and movies on VHS are extensive. When those grow old, there are years’ worth of old National Geographics and Science magazines -- where research conducted at this station is sometimes published.

Even as the full summer season winds down and a skeleton crew of four prepares to take over the winter duties later this month, the place still ticks along quietly, at 7 in the morning beneath a long summer sun.

My first ski landing awoke me with a jolt. Even though these planes are loud -- we all wear earplugs and we don’t try to have much conversation -- it’s easy to sleep after you’ve watched the ice for a while. The outrageous roar of the propellers can lull you to sleep, as I’ve discovered.

The landing was smooth enough. The cold was less intense than I expected, even at 12 degrees. I found that I was, in fact, overdressed.

Above: Alaska Newspapers State reporter Dustin Solberg found himself ‘overdressed’ for Greenland when the ice sheet warmed up to 12 degrees.
Photo:Dustin Solberg/Alaska Newspapers

On snowmachines equipped with long sleds, we traveled to a site where a team of Dutch scientists is conducting research on snow chemistry.

Snow stretches across a flat expanse for as far as you can imagine, and perhaps farther. No wildlife is found here, though I’m told stray, exhausted birds sometimes show up -- frozen and dead. I was shown a frozen Arctic tern that fell short of its migration destination.

After dinner, four of us piled onto a snowmachine and sled and drove straight into the eastern horizon for just a few minutes. I sat backwards on the trailer, my parka hood over my head, and stayed warm as we bumped across the occasional drifts. When we killed the engine, I was dusted in snow.

I looked out across the snow and saw not a trace of the camp: sun, snow, blue sky. In just minutes, fog swept across the sky, obscuring our view.

By 10 a.m., I was aboard the C-130 again. From Kangerlussuaq, we flew to Thule Air Force Base, where one extensive project funded by the National Science Foundation is under way. Thule is a remote place with a population of about 700. It considers itself the “Top of the World,” and that’s barely hyperbole. Few live so far north -- fewer than 3,000 people live north of 75 degrees.

Thule is a collection of buildings perched atop the rocky tundra that shows the signs of a harsh Arctic environment.

What’s surprising about this spartan and impermanent-looking settlement is that this base has been here since the height of the Cold War, and more than 10,000 people once lived here. It was a radar and bomber base at that time.

For lunch, my guide for the day, University of Alaska Anchorage grad student Matt Rogers, led me to the Top of the World club, where I ordered a hearty plate of Danish meatballs and boiled potatoes. It came with cabbage in a creamy sauce.

Though we were indeed far from North America, the club has the normal accoutrements of any suburban restaurant. A lengthy menu, jukebox, a full bar.

We stay in the North Star Inn, a motel with tidy rooms and window shades to block out the perpetual sunshine. It has an efficient, European aesthetic that seems out of place in such a remote and harsh environment.

We eat some meals in the cafeteria buffet, where we pay $3.30 for supper. $2.70 for a breakfast that includes California oranges.

Today, this base serves a space-monitoring mission. But this has nothing to do with why I’ve come here. It’s also the site of an extensive experiment in these relatively arid tundra soils.

Tundra soils contain extensive reserves of carbon -- buried deep -- and as the scientific community tries to understand the relationship between planet earth and atmospheric carbon dioxide, I’m told, it’s important to understand these soils.

To the uninitiated, such research questions might seem maddeningly detailed, but understanding the big picture requires such an understanding of even the small scale. Even bacteria buried in the soil matter.

After awaking at 4 o’clock this morning, the wheels of the C-130 touched the runway here on Greenlandic soil exactly 14 hours later. After we boarded the plane and squeezed foam plugs into our ears, we were soon taxiing across the Stratton Air National Guard Base tarmac. We were one of three planes on this morning departing New York bound for Kangerlussuaq. On my flight, nearly every seat was filled with a scientist, camp logistical worker, or a few Guard members.

We sit on webbed seats in four rows that run the length of the plane. So we sit across from one another, our knees nearly touching.

Sometime after noon, local time, we land at the airport in St. John’s, Newfoundland, and “sip” extra fuel.

While on the ground here I notice that the season seems much like the one I had left in Alaska. The fireweed, most notably, blooms as if in tandem with that I left.

Later, I saw some remnants of summer sea ice from one of the little windows in the plane. It’s too loud to talk, but we look out the window at the sea below, read books, and some of us nap.

By the time we’ve been fed in the cafeteria here at this former U.S. airbase-turned-Greenlandic travel hub, it’s a long day. We’re soon outfitted with polar gear – Sorel footwear, parkas, and the like – before sitting down to meet with a few scientists here at the support center.

Tomorrow, we travel to Thule, above the Arctic Circle on Greenland’s northwestern coast, to drop in on a research project under way on the island’s tundra fringe.

“Alaska?” he asked.

I’d just sat down in the back seat of his taxi after a cross-country series of flights.

We pulled away from the white glow of the airport and into the pitch dark of the 11 p.m. night.

The driver’s name was Rohan. It turns out he had just seen the proverbial National Geographic special about Alaska. He wanted to know about eating buried, rotting fish heads.

“Yes, they’re fermented,” I told him. But I’d never tried salmon heads prepared this traditional way, I added.

It had me thinking about the smoked salmon we’d just pulled from our backyard smoker days earlier. I carried some in my luggage, and just now his question reminded me that I hadn’t eaten on my last flight. I was hungry.

After mentioning my destination – I’m bound for Greenland to visit scientists addressing climate change questions – Rohan made it plain that not only had a changing climate entered the consciousness of so many of us. Its effects on the polar north had, too.

He knew of the most dramatic, telltale signs of global warming now evident in far-off places like Greenland and Alaska.

He’d seen it on TV: glacial ice calving into the sea makes for good video.

And indeed, in some places, glacial ice is calving into the ice at rates so accelerated that generally cautious scientists have called it alarming. It can make you rethink what “glacial pace” really means. A junket of D.C. politicians had just toured Greenland’s rapidly advancing Jakobshavn Glacier a week ago – a way to make the string of climatologists’ reports to Washington tangible. That visit raised the profile of this disappearing ice even more.

Out of the blue, Rohan told me he would himself like to be a photojournalist. Back in his native Guyana – you know, the coastal South American nation on Brazil’s northern border – he has watched rivers fouled by what flowed downstream from an accident at the Omai gold mine run by a Canadian mining company, he said.

If he had a good camera, he told me as the road to Albany stretched behind us, he’d go back home and take pictures of tainted rivers.

I am in New York state, bound for Schenectady, where I will meet up with a team from the National Science Foundation before traveling aboard a cavernous C-130 with the 109th Airlift Wing of the New York Air National Guard.

Its “skibirds” link NSF scientists with their research posts in Greenland and, in austral summer, Antarctica.

Logistic necessity aside, Schenectady seems an appropriate stopping place for a reporter’s climate science expedition.

Though today it is a faded industrial city, it was once a vanguard in America’s quest for technological advancement. Thomas Edison is lionized here as electricity’s titan. The moment he first stepped off the train here – Aug. 20, 1886 – has earned its own monument.

Then, Schenectady was a city amid fields of broomcorn that fed a bustling steam-powered industry of broom manufacturing. Edison and his start-up, General Electric, turned it into an early Silicon Valley. All of the electricity we’ve come to rely on has a source, if an invisible one.

Last week, I heard Jeff Goodell, author of “Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America's Energy Future,” admit electricity’s source was once a mystery to him. He grew up in Silicon Valley, worked for Apple Computer in the early days, and admitted a “giddy celebration of our sort of iPod economy.”

“I never thought about where those electrons came from,” he told his Anchorage audience.

Most of our nation’s electricity comes from coal. And more than a third of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions come from coal-burning power plants. And then there’s the soot, which shows up even in Greenland. Goodell said we Americans, per person, burn 20 pounds a day.

This matter, too, is of interest to Alaskans because half of U.S. coal is underneath Alaska.

Like Rohan or the D.C. politicos, probably we’ve all learned something new in the last year – or even months or weeks – about the planet’s changing climate.

These conversations are especially lively in Alaska, where our two senators have co-sponsored a bill meant to get carbon dioxide polluters to help pay the tab for rebuilding a nation for a climate altogether different.

For the next week, I’ll immerse myself in the intricacies of several polar research projects supported by the National Science Foundation. I hope you’ll look here to learn what I find.

Back on the road, in Schenectady, Rohan’s Crown Victoria taxi finally glided into the motel parking lot. I gave him $25 for the ride – and his insight. He gave me a tourist map.

We shook hands and wished each other well.

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