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