It wasn’t your ordinary helictoper journey. As the enormous red and white Sikorsky 61 hovered in to land on the rocky, uneven ground, the force of the blasting air left me barely able to breath, crouched against my rucksack, leaning into the cold wind. Through my fingers, held protectively over my eyes, I could see …

“It’s cold today, isn’t it?” I comment to my son, as we trudge up the hill toward home. “Yeah, a bit,” he replies. It’s minus eighteen celsius and the wind is blowing. It’s cold. Is it my imagination, or does the return of this brilliant spring light sharpen the air? The piercing light leaves us …

It’s easy to get excited about new things, however mundane, when one lives in a small place, even if that small place happens to be the capital city and is locally regarded as a metropolis with its bustling population of 17,000. So it was one morning this week when, as the bus approached our stop, …

Geological mapping hasn’t really changed very much in the hundred and fifty odd years that geologists have been producing maps in earnest. Sixteen years ago, the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland published the last remaining 1:500,000 scale geological map of Greenland. It was a milestone marking the culmination of more than fifty years of …

I remember, about fifteen years ago, when map-based GPS units were introduced to the Air Greenland helicopter fleet. It was the end of a field season in west Greenland and I was camped near the inland ice, a good forty-five minute flight from Nuuk. Ours was the last field camp to be flown back from …

Our son still laments the loss of dad’s ‘fast car’ that we had to leave behind in Australia when we moved to Greenland. He loved cruising around in the back of that convertible, basking in the warm southern sun, blond hair blowing in the breeze. But moving to Greenland meant leaving it behind. It’s one …

Fiskefjord is a long, narrow gash-like fjord north of Nuuk that cuts its way toward the inland ice. Islands break its watery path. Its walls are merely hills, not cliff-walled mountains like those of many other fjords on the west coast. Nonetheless, Fiskefjord can make itself felt. “Go through on the slack tide,” we were …

*Australian January mean temperature anomaly (Australian Bureau of Meteorology) with overlaid Standardized Melt Index for the Greenland Ice Sheet (National Snow and Ice Data Center) My son was born in northern Australia but he’s lived almost half of his young life in Greenland. He sees changes all around him – both in the Arctic environment …