I was at a cafemik this week – coffee and cake at a friend’s house, to celebrate a birthday. There were a lot of people and my husband and I sat down with a group, some of whom we knew, some we didn’t. I got chatting to a woman I hadn’t met before. She asked …
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 …
*Another startled Greenlandic resident – a tupilak from the Nuuk Art Museum One meets diverse and unexpected people in Greenland at diverse and unexpected times. Last summer, a friend invited my husband, son and I over for coffee and cake one Sunday afternoon. She had some foreign visitors, officials of some kind from the UK …
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 …
When I was a kid, we spent the long summer holidays in a caravan park by a lake that opened to the Pacific Ocean. As Christmas approached, the days grew hotter. We spent our days swimming in the cool water of the lake, fishing from an aluminimun dinghy in the whispering shadows of leaning casuarina …
Walking along the street toward work in the morning darkness, I watched the seconds on my phone stopwatch slowly tick toward 8:15am. Only 45 seconds to go. I was ready to make the call. Careful to keep my footing on the icy pavement, I watched the seconds creep by…tick…tick…tick. But what was it I had …