Submitted by Eric Collins

I have been in Daneborg participating in leg three of this year’s field campaign in the Arctic Science Partnership collaboration to study the microbial communities associated with spring sea ice and melt ponds using next generation DNA sequencing technologies.

The goal of this project is to identify changes in the communities of bacteria, archaea, ice algae, and other microbial eukaryotes in first year sea ice during the spring transition, as the surface melts and the ice drains.

Interactions between ice algae bacteria

With my collaborator Jody Deming at the University of Washington, we are interested in the biochemical interactions between bacteria and algae in the ice.

Specifically, we are investigating whether the production and consumption of compatible solutes - chemicals that bacteria and algae use to protect against salt stress in the ice - act synergistically between the two groups in a seasonal cycle.

Due to the decreasing presence of multi-year ice in the Arctic as a consequence of global warming, increasingly large areas of the Arctic will be covered with first year sea ice and Daneborg is an exciting High Arctic research platform to study the interactions among microbes in first year sea ice.

Improved methods

In previous Arctic campaigns in 2004 and 2007 aboard the Canadian icebreaker CCGS Amundsen, I was part of a project to investigate the microbial communities associated with autumn and winter sea ice using the available molecular biology tools of the time.

Those tools allowed us to do 'fingerprinting' of the microbial communities over time in the ice, and to get about 100 DNA sequence 'barcodes' from two of those communities. The barcode is a unique signature within each species' genome that distinguishes it from others. An example of a barcode might look like this: AACAATCTCCTAAACCTG.

With today's technology we will be able to get more than 10,000,000 barcodes from hundreds of samples of sea ice and melt ponds from Daneborg, allowing us to reconstruct the microbial communities to a very fine level.

Submitted by Sergei Kirillov and Vlad Petrushevich

The vast of north-eastern Greenland waters covered with sea-ice are opened before the view of scientists coming to Young Sound in spring time. Ahead of us a number of experiments that will help to understand wide range of complicated and often unclear hydrophysical, biological and geochemical processes which affect the climate of our planet. We wondered how all these processes are related and how they are interconnected?

Arctic fjords play a key role in these processes due to land-fast ice coverage. Large areas of open waters called polynyas occasionally exist at the mouths of fjords. These areas are the source of tremendous heat movement, and our study site here at Young Sound is no exception. From October until June the ice is as much as 1.6 m thick.  At the mouth of the fjord the land fast ice is replaced with the pack ice that is pushed south along the East Greenland shore by the East-Greenland current. Our team of physical oceanographers leaded by Dr. Igor Dmitrenko (CEOS – University of Manitoba) is closely looking at this area, where a large polynya forms and disappears at the mouth of the fjord. Our main goal is to better understand the impact of sea-ice processes on fjord waters and how they are affected by this large flaw in the sea ice. In October 2013 we placed several ice tethered moorings in the newly-formed ice - measuring temperature, salinity, and current velocities beneath the sea-ice. We deployed these in concert with colleagues at CEOS who put buoys to measure the growth and decay of the ice with their own beacons.

Despite our best efforts we were not able to recover all of our equipment: one of them was lost in December – blown out to sea when the ice it was deployed on was broken off in a storm. Moreover, the unusually snowy winter weighed heavy on the ice and flooded the surface layer burying the top parts of many moorings in a thick layer (40-50 cm) of slush and ice.  We spent hours chipping away at the ice to free our equipment! Nevertheless data seem to be sufficient for determining the processes responsible for forming of the local vertical circulation cell. This cell pushed salty and oxygen enriched water from the outer into the inner fjord at intermediate depths – influencing ice formation and melt deep inland.

Our Acoustic Doppler Current Profilers (ADCPs) allowed us to sample the current velocity at different locations using sounds. This dataset may help to figure out the dynamics at the farthest boundary of the fjord and the ocean– over the glacial sill where the tidal currents drastically increase as they are funneled into the narrow and shallow fjord entrance.   We do this to understand how the mixing ocean waters affect their surroundings and improve our knowledge of the hydrological and oceanographic regimes of Eastern Greenland.

Submitted by Stine Højlund Pedersen

It has been a true adventure being out in the white late-winter, traveling through remote landscapes and we now return with an extensive snow dataset.

Traveling on snow mobiles, we have collected snow data as a part of my PhD project in a region stretching from the most eastern point of Wollaston Foreland, through the broad valleys around Zackenberg Research Station, and into the inland parts of Tyrolerfjord and Store Sødal with their mountainous terrain populated by numerous groups of 3-10 musk oxen. Glen Liston (Colorado State University) and I measured snow depths, dug snow pit to measure snow density and stratigraphy and noted snow crystal sizes and hardness. This data will help us to reveal the main drivers for the regional snow distribution.

Several strong storms have hit the area during the winter and packed the snow cover leaving the snow surface icy, ‘polished,’ and shining in large patches all over the region. We found solid ice encapsulating the vegetation in the bottom of most of our snow pits and additional ice lenses, hard as stone in the snow, made it a challenging work to dig our 2.5 m deep snow pits around Wollaston Foreland.

During our travels we stayed in tiny trapper huts, with dimensions as small as 2.0 by 2.7 meters, heated with coal and we felt how the arctic winter slowly relaxed the grip as air temperatures climbed from -26 to -10 °C. Fortunately, we were gifted with many sunny and clear days and experienced only four days of snow storm with winds strong enough to knock you down and reduce the visibility to only a few meters

Submitted by Lise Lotte Sørensen and Geoff Gunn

It was a bumpy ride when Bruno De Lille was dragged over the ice sitting on the mobile tower battery box, but someone had to prevent the battery box from sliding when the tower was pulled from Daneborg Marine Research station to the research field. The research team has now installed micrometeorological instruments and CO₂ sensors for measurements of air-sea ice/snow exchange of CO₂ at two towers; a mobile sled tower and a fixed tower. The team measures the exchange of CO₂ between the air and the snow covered ice. The air-surface fluxes are assessed by eddy covariance but this method requires some wind, and this week has been calm and foggy and only small fluxes of CO₂ can be measured over the sea ice. The eddy covariance method measure the flux from an area upwind of our towers – called the ‘footprint’. To understand what the instruments are reading researcher Geoff Gunn has used an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle to photograph the footprint without disturbing it and altering the carbon flux measurements.

Submitted by: David Babb

Field research in Greenland - a student's perspective!

David Babb, Masters student at the University of Manitoba, shares his recent experience as part of the science team conducting research out of Daneborg, in Young Sund on the Northeast side of Greenland. 

Submitted by: Søren Rysgaard

Spring is getting here even though the temperature is -15C. Small flocks of snow bunting are arriving and today we spotted the first barnacle geese. There is a lot of snow this year and in some places you can walk directly onto the roofs of the buildings. Actually, several places you have to dig a tunnel to get into the buildings. The fjord is in some locations covered by up to a meter of snow that overlies a meter plus of sea ice. The sun is shining from a clear blue sky and for days there has been no wind what so ever. Seals are emerging on the sea ice enjoying the return of the Sun. Everything is quiet as it can only be up here. We are back at fieldwork. We are the first team at the Zackenberg station in Daneborg, NE Greenland (74N) in this year’s comprehensive field campaign in the Arctic Science Partnership collaboration. We have ongoing work in several places this year with more than one hundred scientists and students in the field at Zackenberg, Daneborg, Nuuk, Disko Bay, Cambridge Bay, Resolute, Hudson Bay, and onboard the Canadian research icebreaker CCGS Amundsen in the Canadian North.

Our team will concentrate on snow and sea ice and how it interacts with the atmosphere and ocean. Last autumn we deployed several moorings collecting various parameters in the atmosphere (irradiance, temperature, wind speed direction, carbon dioxide concentration etc.), snow (thickness, temperature), sea ice (thickness, temperature, salinity, permeability etc) and ocean (temperature, salinity and currents, irradiance, turbidity etc). Several of these transmit their data via satellite. Unfortunately, we lost contact with one of the ocean mooring positions during winter. We have now localized all moorings, but one is missing.

The area outside Young Sound is interesting because of the presence of a polynya. A polynya is a site where sea ice is produced and frequently blown away from the area thereby allowing new ice to form again. It is a kind of sea ice fabric. There are different kinds of polynyas but this one is a wind driven one. The function of a polynya and its influence on deep-water formation and greenhouse gas exchange between the atmosphere and ocean are not well understood. In order to obtain the expected signal in the water column (cold and more salty water) we need to be close to the site of the polynya. Unfortunately this mooring was too close. It is irritating as sea ice broke off just 100-200 m inside the mooring position. We hope to find it when the sea ice melts in the fjord.

We have started to recover the other moorings and download data. We will deploy them again and capture the signal of the melting sea ice as we approach the summer thaw. It is going to be a wet season due to all the snow and the scientists following us need to bring rubber boots and other waterproof clothes when working on the melting sea ice cover. The idea is to study melt ponds as they develop and disappear just before the sea ice breaks up. On this leg, scientists are characterizing snow and ice texture, gas content, biological and chemical processes. In addition, we collect measurements from across and along the fjord from the Greenland Ice Sheet into the Greenland Sea in order to understand the variation of snow and ice thickness and its interaction with the atmosphere and ocean and to provide data for up scaling.

We also cover measurements in the water column below the sea ice to the sea floor. It is a hard work to make these graphs; our transects extend for hundred of kilometers and each site ( 2-3 km apart) involves clearing 30-100 cm snow, drilling through meter thick sea ice, setting up a tripod to get our instruments into the water without freezing and then by lowering it (by hand) down to the sea floor that is 350 m deep in some places. We are operating from skidoos inside the fjord, but have also airboats that can fly over snow, ice and open water when melting advances.

Days are long in the field. We start early and work often to midnight. Often there are long evenings in the laboratory here in Daneborg. And just before going to sleep, notes have to be made and the day’s data saved. People are looking tired in the evenings but it is difficult to get to bed as the sun is up day and night. We are approximately 1000 km north of the Polar Circle.

We take turns in the kitchen and right now it smells of fresh baked bread. Time is 1 am and people are still working. Looking around the table we have people from Greenland, Canada, Denmark, Russia, India, Belgium. What a team!