Greetings from Ilulissat, southeast of Disko Island. We arrived here two days ago after a day and a half transit from Nuuk, the capital of Greenland. We were at anchor yesterday but tied up at a dock this morning for open boats later today. A mid-sized fishing boat was already at the dock when we came in, leaving not much room to maneuver the Arctic Sunrise into place. Even so, Arne "parked" the ship as easily as I would my car, except there is a huge difference between my comparatively tiny Subaru and a 900-ton ship.

The main attraction here is the glacier in Ilulissat Fjord. The Danish name for the town and the glacier is Jakobshavn, but it's more appropriate and politically correct to refer to them by their Greenlandic name: Ilulissat. Ilulissat glacier is easily accessible from the town of Ilulissat, making it the most studied glacier in Greenland. It's the world's fastest moving glacier at 14km/year (beating out Kangerdlugssuaq by 0.2km/year!), and it doubled its speed and retreated 10km between 1992 and 2003. I'm mentioning this since all of the scientific research and articles I’ve seen on the glacier refer to it as "Jakobshavn Glacier" or "Jakobshavn Isbrae," so keep that in mind if you Google the name to get more information.

At any rate, I went ashore yesterday with Martina, Nick (photographer), Andreas (videographer) and Gunilla (Swedish journalist). The harbor is filled with fishing boats from small skiffs to small trawlers, and the world’s largest halibut processing plant sits on the dock right behind us. Martin (cook) traded half a carton of cigarettes for a huge garbage bag filled with cod that was so fresh it was still moving.

Martina cold-called a tourist shop because it had the word "nature" in its name, which turned out to be a very lucky call. The shop owner is from Italy but has been in Greenland for 25 years and speaks fluent Greenlandic, Danish and English. He hooked us up with an Inuit hunter, Niels, and within a half hour of walking into the shop Niels was telling us how climate change has affected his ability to hunt and fish. Niels offered to take Nick, Andreas and Gunilla out in his boat so they could see where he fishes.

While they were doing that, Martina and I walked through town putting up posters about today's open boats. It didn’t take long to figure out that Ilulissat is different from other communities we've visited in Greenland. For one, a lot of tourists come here to backpack, dog sledge, and see the glacier and ice sheet. Between tourism and the thriving fishing industry, the economy seems to be doing ok and there appears to be a whole lot less unemployment. Yes, there are obvious downsides to tourism, and if not done sustainably, then fishing has its own set of problems. But if a town has to develop itself economically, then given the choice between tourism and oil and gas development, I'd choose tourism any day.

Lots of people here - Greenlandic and Danes alike - ask us about the sealing issue. It's been really good to be able to listen to peoples’ concerns and then respond with what Greenpeace did and did not do vis-a-vis the seal issue. Explaining that Greenpeace never opposed sealing in Greenland and that we don’t oppose their current hunting and fishing goes a long way to mend relationships. Of course, there will always be people who dislike Greenpeace regardless of what we say and do, but that's the same wherever we go. Millie, the Greenlandic translator who was on board for the first half of the trip, told us that for many Greenlanders, it’s important for them to get issues off their chest, and once they’ve been aired, they can move on. Of course that is a simplistic way of describing a cultural attribute, but it does seem to be the case with folks we speak with. It's a very practical, compassionate and forgiving way to maneuver through the world.

It's easy to bridge from the sealing issue to how climate change is affecting and will continue to affect sea ice, and how that in turn affects hunting. Everyone we've spoken to has a story to tell about how the weather has changed: it's not as cold as it used to be, it's hotter than it ever has been, the ice has changed, they can no longer dog sled for as many months per year, or some other anecdotal evidence about climate change. All the people we've met are unanimously in favor of Greenpeace's climate work in Greenland. Many have said they hope we can amplify their voices so that industrialized countries hear the message that climate change is an urgent problem and requires immediate action. Climate change is a threat to their very existence and we certainly don't have to tell them that. As a related aside, the vice mayor of Ilulissat provided great testimony on video about the impact of climate change on this community and on Greenlandic culture, but he started out his interview by basically asking, "do you mind if I begin by explaining how grateful I am that Greenpeace is here and how thankful I am for your work on climate change?" Clearly, our work and message on climate change is very well received and the potential for future campaigning is enormous.

Today's open boats were very successful. Hundreds of people showed up at the ship between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. and again from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. The ship was packed the entire time. The earlier open boat had a good mix of European tourists from a cruise ship that's in town for a day, as well as many Ilulissat residents. Members of the Danish Parliament arrived on a boat that tied up near the Arctic Sunrise, so Thom (radio operator) walked over with a bunch of pamphlets and invited them on board to see the ship. Many of them accepted the offer, and it was great to speak with them, too. I can't imagine having an impromptu, honest and forthright conversation with any member of the U.S. Congress, especially on board a Greenpeace ship.

The evening open boat was punctuated by the return of our helicopter. Before the open boat started the helicopter flew off with Arne to Ilulissat Fjord so he could check out the ice conditions and report back to a Jason (a scientist working with us on board) about whether it would be at all possible to bring a ship into the fjord to undertake scientific measurements. There were about 100+ people on board the ship and once we knew the helicopter would be back within three minutes, we corralled them all to safe viewing places forward of the ship's crane. It was quite dramatic and no doubt a memorable event for all of our visitors.

Tomorrow morning we pick up two Italian TV journalists, then head north for a few hours to a new anchorage where we'll document the melt lakes on the ice sheet. More on that soon.

- Melanie

"Please work", said Jason Box (Ohio State Geography/Byrd Polar Research Center glaciologist) as if in prayer, before we even land. This morning he had retrieved the first of his automatic monitoring cameras - set up last May. It had taken exactly one photo (the day after he set it up), and then stopped working. Definitely a setback, although not entirely surprising given the harsh conditions, precarious nature of electronics and this relatively novel application of automatic monitoring.

Now we are landing at a second site. This one on the ice sheet itself. As soon as Hughie (heli pilot) gives us the OK, we're out of the helicopter and getting the camera down. When Jason installed it, the white battery box was at ground level, but as usual the winter snow has all melted by now - leaving the batteries almost out of reach. Carefully we lower the mounting pole and open the airtight camera enclosure. Jason's too eager to check the camera to explain his setup just now, but we go over it later.

How it works

The camera is a regular consumer brand digital still camera connected to something called an "intervalometer" - a device that operates at intervals. The intervalometer takes a picture every few hours throughout the day. The power comes from two sealed gel cell batteries, like car batteries but smaller, recharged by a 20 watt solar panel, which Jason calculates supplies about twice as much power as the system needs. The enclosure is the same type used for security cameras, and is packed with silicon desiccant to absorb the moisture inside and keep the glass from fogging up.

Jason tested his equipment in an Ohio University cold room with temperature sensors inside the camera. Even at -4 Fahrenheit (-20C) the camera kept itself warm enough to stay just above freezing. Although Jason first used a digital camera to do time lapse monitoring (of snow drifts) in 1996, and Station Zackenberg has had a year-round camera on a mountain since about the same time, the ones we took down today are the first long term monitoring cameras on the ice cap that Jason knows of.

[View snow drift animation here: http://polarmet.mps.ohio-state.edu/jbox/drift]

When Jason set the camera up on location, he and his college surveyed the area and set out marker flags at known GPS coordinates to give him some frame of reference when looking at the photos. The surrounding landscape is changed over time by snow, rain and wind (although no matter what time of year it is, the scenery at the camera site can be described as "basically white").

The all important data

When we get it down, the enclosure is intact, and the camera in good shape. Jason gingerly pulls it out, and turns it on. "There are 516 pictures on this camera," he tells me grinning. Looking at the images back on the ship, we realize that he has succeeded in documenting a melt lake forming - and draining, and forming, and draining, and so on. This is slightly unexpected, and possibly interesting. Other melt lakes have been observed to fill slowly, and then drain suddenly.

At the third site of the day, the camera proves more difficult to get down. We end up using a hacksaw to cut through its mounting pole. This camera has also worked. It monitored a ridge in the ice sheet. If the ridge changed position as summer went on, then it was probably related to climate events, if it stayed in one place it was probably structural to the ice sheet. Just eyeballing the images, it looks like it didn't move.

Later, the two working cameras will both be redeployed to monitor the front of Jakobshavn glacier. Jakobshavn is a well-studied glacier that has more than doubled in speed over the last ten years. Intensive monitoring, using these cameras, will provide insight into how fast it is moving at its bottom end, and how much its speed varies seasonally. This is an outlet glacier - meaning it transports ice from the ice sheet down into the ocean. Outlet glaciers are thought to be vital to the fate of the Greenland ice sheet, and the fact that major ones surveyed on this trip are speeding up is alarming.

Results

The data collected, although not Earth shaking, will add to the body of knowledge about what is happening to the Greenland ice sheet. Also important, is that this method of collecting data can be applied in other research areas as well – such as monitoring the volume of ice coming off glaciers in the form of icebergs.

This is often how science works, not with Jurassic Park like suddenness, but with incremental steps forward. One experiment leading to the next, and a continuing refinement of techniques. In fact, it took over a decade, and hundreds-of-thousands of man-hours, before the authoritative scientific body on the subject concluded that our planet is heating up at least in part (probably mostly) because of our greenhouse gas emissions (2001 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Third Assessment).

It's folly to ignore so much painstakingly accumulated scientific evidence - yet that is what many, including the Bush administration, are trying to do. Despite their resistance, we need to start an energy revolution - to go from a fossil fuel dominated energy strategy to one that takes advantage of renewable energy technologies. If you are in the U.S., your help is especially needed.

- Andrew