It's a beautiful Sunday. Warm enough that the hammock is out on deck for the first time this trip, but nobody's using it. Pretty much everyone who has the day off is hiking on shore. For some though, their duties are keeping them busy.

Hughie is working with a helicopter mechanic who's flown in for the weekend. Nearby Kulusuk is a major airport for East Greenland, so it's a rare chance to get some operational maintenance done.

Martina and Melanie (campaigners) somehow seem to be in meetings all day. Funny how you can take the campaigner out of the office, but...

Anyway, I sat down with Martina to talk about how this weblog is going. We're half way through the Greenland leg of the tour, so it's a good time to reflect on what has worked so far and what we could do better in the second half. If you have any suggestions, feel free to post them in the comments.

And if you've been following our tour, but haven't taken action yet on global warming now is also a good time to start. Weatherize your house, buy compact fluorescent light bulbs, ask your power company if there is the option to buy electricity from renewable sources. There are plenty of things regular people can do to help. If you're in the U.S., your action is especially needed. The changes we are seeing, and hearing about from Greenlanders, make it very obvious that we should all really be doing more.

Speaking of changes, Gordon and Leigh have finished their second set of measurements on Helheim glacier. They'll do two more sets, finishing up at around four next morning. Stay tuned and I'll let you know what the results are when we get them.

- Andrew

[Photo: Hughie sets the helicopter down on an iceberg next to the Arctic Sunrise during a test flight.]

It's a tense morning on board. People have been working around the clock. Hughie (heli pilot) woke up at three this morning when the light coming through his porthole changed. The fog was lifting. Gordon and Leigh, the University of Maine glaciologists on board, hadn't been to sleep at all - waiting to see if they could get out to the Helheim glacier. By 05:30 in the morning that the fog had lifted enough for Hughie and Gordon to go scout it.

This is something of a bonus glacier. Gordon and Leigh were scheduled to fly out from nearby Kulusuk on Sunday. But Gordon wanted to at least take a look at the Helheim glacier since the most recent satellite image of it is from 2001.

What he saw was dramatic enough to make them change their flight. Helheim glacier is visibly rotten, and giant pieces of it are calving off and floating away as it retreats. One crescent shaped iceberg, over a hundred meters wide and roughly a kilometer long, had recently broken away from the face. With the glacier crumbling this badly, Gordon wasn't sure at first if they could even conduct their research on it, but made a decision to at least try.

After setting up the usual base camp - with emergency supplies and a static GPS receiver on solid ground (to act as a reference point) - Gordon and Hughie returned to the ship for refueling and to pick up Leigh. Meanwhile, we had been sailing up the fjord through what Martina is calling an "iceberg graveyard". Pete (chief mate) carefully weaving through hundreds of them - some bigger than anything we've seen before on this trip.

The glaciologists didn't wait for us though. They are under pressure to return the precision GPS receivers because another research team is counting on using them. They soon headed off to the glacier.

Finding safe places to land the helicopter and deploy the receivers proved as challenging as feared. Even a kilometer and a half back from the front, this glacier was easily the most difficult to work on yet. As usual, Hughie never shut the helicopter down, always ready for a quick evacuation, and most of the receivers had to be attached to ice anchors to keep them from slipping off into a crevasse while unattended.

Now, the team is back on board, having completed their first round of measurements. They'll return to the glacier some hours later and redeploy the equipment in the same locations (marked with the antenna poles and pink flagging tape). By comparing the two data sets, they'll be able to see how fast the glacier ice is flowing - a critical question for the fate of the Greenland ice sheet, which feeds these glaciers.

It's important to learn more about how global warming is changing our world, but it's also important to act. If we don't rapidly reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by switching to renewable energy sources, global warming is only going to get worse. If you're in the U.S., the world's worst global warming polluter per capita, your help is especially needed.

- Andrew