It's Saturday and we are anchored in a lovely bay we've nicknamed "Pete's Haven" after the first mate. We are east of Disko (every time I say "Disko" I move my arm like John Travolta in "Saturday Night Fever") and Arveprinsens islands, it was a short transit of about five hours last night from Ilulissat to get here.

Pete's Havn is really lovely. The ship is located 2.5 nautical miles (4.6km) from Eqip Sermia, a glacier that flows out from the Greenland Ice Sheet into the bay. Even from here the glacier looks formidable. Jason Box, the scientist on board, says the glacier's calving front is 330 feet (100m) high in some places. Yowza. Between the ship and Eqip Sermia lies a nunatak: a rocky point that once poked out from a glacier. The nunatak near us is now an island, but at some point I guess this entire bay was filled with glacial ice and only the top of the island stuck out. The land near Eqip Sermia is barren but the land closest to the ship is covered by green tundra, testament to the influence of glaciers on the landscape.

Last night Hughie flew a reconnaissance flight to check out the melt lakes and other structures on the ice sheet so we could then make a plan on how to best to measure their depth and document them. Jason went along with him and came back with some pretty incredible pictures taken on his small digital camera through the helicopter's plexiglass windows. This part of the ice sheet is riddled with melt lakes, rushing rivers and moulins (a moulin is a large hole where a meltwater river disappears into the bowels of an ice sheet or glacier). You wouldn't think that an ice sheet would have so much moving water on it. The lakes are very striking to look at, much like Mono Lake or the Dead Sea in the middle of the desert. I'm confident we'll be able to document them in a way that will explain to the rest of the world the compelling nature of this huge meltwater system in a place that we all think of as frozen solid all the time. I mean, who would think it'd be possible to stand on the Greenland Ice Sheet with a six km wide melt lake or roaring river nearby? I can't think of a better visual for telling the story of how climate change is affecting the Greenland Ice Sheet.

Our plan today was to begin flying people and gear up to the ice sheet at 9:00 a.m. and use a small inflatable boat and a fish finder to measure the depth of each lake. The depth measurements could then be compared with the color of the lakes in satellite photos, giving scientists a way to approximate the volume of water held in the lakes. This is important because as the melt lakes drain they deliver water and a warming signal into the glacier's core. Some of the water winds up at the base of the glacier where it lubricates and hastens the glacier's flow from the ice sheet into the sea, where it then calves into icebergs.

When we got up at 7:30 a.m., it was clear and calm outside – perfect weather for flying. But a little past 8:00 a.m. catabatic winds started flowing off the ice sheet and by 9:00 a.m. the winds were a steady 30 knots with gusts to 40+ knots (74 km/hr). Hughie could have flown up to the ice sheet, but it would have been difficult and dangerous to deploy the equipment and make measurements in that kind of wind.

So we spent the day waiting, waiting, waiting for the winds to die down, but it's 9 p.m. and they're still blowing with a vengeance. There won't be any flying tonight because there's only about an hour and a half of good light left. Catabatic winds die down in the evening, or so I'm told. I don't completely understand how they work but they seem to be fueled by cold winds on the ice sheet and changes in temperature caused by the shift between day and night. Hopefully the winds will die down by tomorrow morning and we can get an early start. Our itinerary has a lot of 'weather days' built into it, but I always thought they would be used for delays caused by fog and ice. I never imagined our work being delayed by catabatic winds. The winds have an odd feel to them because the sky is clear and blue, whereas the wind is what I'd normally associate with dark skies and horizontal rain. The ship has been swinging 'round and 'round on the anchor chain, it's almost dizzying.

Today is John's 42nd birthday and as part of the celebration, Martin and Isha made him a cake in the shape of Greenland. They baked a sheet cake, cut out the shape of the country and then used cut away pieces of cake to form mountain ranges and islands. A thick layer of chocolate icing covered the cake and whipped cream was the ice cap. A small wooden Arctic Sunrise used to track the ship's location on a world map in the messroom was placed in a "bay" on the cake, along with 43 candles (one for good luck). It's the most amazing cake I've ever seen, and the most delicious country I've ever eaten. I had a piece of Scoresby Sound, Faye and Hettie ate Disko Island, and the Birthday Boy himself demolished Thule, where a "Star Wars" radar station is located, in a mere three bites. The cake was unveiled not even two hours ago and when last I looked, our unregulated addiction to chocolate (1/2kg in the cake, 1kg in the icing) already resulted in destruction of 2/3 of the country.

Signing out from the Greenland lake district,

- Melanie

It was one of those few best days, a day that was like two or more good ones combined. Later, I found myself thinking, was that really today or yesterday? This life is full of wonder. Greenland is a spectacular place.

Helicopter flights took us over spectacular scenes, where colors and scale defy comprehension. One moment you're thinking, 'that looks just like the Caribbean', then you're jarred back to the Arctic by massive flowing ice! This visual stimulation combined with the genuine satisfaction of completing a goal that began so recently as a humble idea. We had just deployed two automatic digital cameras, 'looking' at huge glaciers. This morning, we had been waiting through a lengthy application process for permission to land and leave equipment in this World Heritage site. And just as we were losing hope, the final fax came though, within moments we were starting the engine to go.

Arriving at the first site, the highest/furthest east land possible, beholding a vast sea of tortured ice, Martin, Hughie and I had the equipment up and running without a hitch. We actually couldn't afford a hitch. We had a maximum of 55 minutes for the work. But, it happened to be t-shirt weather, radiant sun, just enough wind to thwart mosquitoes. Landing at this place felt like what I imagine landing on Mars would be like, and the equipment like an alien observer.

The flight to the next site brought us along the 'ice front' of this massive Kangia/Jakobshavn glacier. But what a mess it looked, having retreated so much in only the past few years. There is no longer a well-defined ice cliff that drops down to water. All you see now is a wreckage of ice with a cliff (ice front) that comes and goes. It seems this glacier has retreated to or even behind its 'grounding line', meaning it no longer has a floating part. This is a huge departure from how I remember the glacier from my first flight over it in 1994. Since then, I've seen it from the air almost each year. I remember how in 2003, we did not recognize the glacier. It had changed in its otherwise fractal appearance of somehow organized crevasses and seracs to practical chaos, wreckage, smithereens. Today, this glacier looks even less healthy to me. Anyhow, I took many many photos that will help us understand how this glacier is changing.

After being buffeted around by clear air turbulence en route to our second of two sites, by a stream of air coming off 'the sheet', we arrived at my 'Cliff Cam' site, that had disappointed me so just two days earlier. The equipment had malfunctioned and delivered one image, one, instead of hundreds, the one being a view of a shallow fog hundreds of meters below. What felt so redeeming was to replace the malfunctioning equipment with a different system, one that had proven itself at two successful sites. The redeployment here was a simple task, and the view from this 300m (980 foot) cliff is just incredible. Thousands of sea birds feed below at the brown plume of water coursing from beneath the glacier. What they so eagerly hunt I know not, but these birds, and their prey, share some symbiotic relationship with the glacier.

My day continued to be exciting, as we landed on the ship, just minutes before the open boat began. A crowd awaited. I had time to change clothes, then out into the crowd... I was engaged, talking in detail with a number of people about how fascinating this unfolding climate story is. I had no expectation that studying Greenland would be this interesting and apparently significant on the global scale. I have reason to believe this ice sheet is contributing significantly to the observed 2.8mm (.11 inch) per year global mean sea level rise. More than 100 million people live within 1 m of sea level and so are threatened by expected rise.

One local said to me, 'we know the climate is changing... we don’t need scientists to tell us this...we just look out the window and see the ice and snow are not where they usually are...and the animals behave differently', apparently referring to how the seal or bird hunting season has changed.

The day ended meeting old friends, friends from 10 years earlier, invited back to their house, some wine to drink, a guitar to play, and a view on the walk to a hopping bar of the sun setting over icebergs.

- Jason