Umimmak Kangerlussuaq

Well, it happened again. Through a series of unexplainable events, I woke up on an airplane on the tarmac of Kangerlussuaq International Airport. The short of it is, I made it. The long of it is, the plane ride. I flew from Denver to Washington, DC, to Copenhagen, Denmark, to Kangerlussuaq, Greenland. You may be saying, "Matt, I thought Denmark is on the other side ...

So this is it. Barring anything exciting happening on the way to the airport, you may consider this my last entry in my Greenland travel blog. My flight leaves early Saturday morning, but since I sleep during the day, it is roughly the equivalent of leaving tomorrow evening. The lidar seems to be working well, and though even on Monday I doubted it was possible, I seem to have accomplished what I came here to do. Since I haven't really got out much ...

The past month has offered quite a unique experience and it proves quite amusing to look back on the trip earlier on. What started as a unique experience in a country far away sort of turned into a several week work-a-thon with more ups and downs than a roller coaster. I will be departing on a C-130 early Saturday morning. Tomorrow is my last night for lidar work, as I must devote most of my time the following night to prepartions for leaving ...

The question I get asked more than any other as of late is "Matt, do you know that you have jam on your shirt?" But, only second after that is, "Matt, what in the world do you eat in Greenland?" If truth be told, the answer to this question isn't terribly interesting. The short of it is not a lot of variety. Fresh fruits and vegetables are not terribly easy to come by up here. There are weekly flights with them, but they are not ...

I haven't bothered to update the past few days for a few reasons: 1. I have been working a lot and very tired at the end of the day. 2. I didn't feel like it. 3. Nothing has been going well. The last thing I want to do is update while I am in a bad mood and let everyone worry. Indeed, it has been a rough past few days. My attempts to characterize the effects of the transmission system on our latest installed laser yielded nothing but gobledy-gook data ...

Kellyville has been hopping the last week. With Jan, Jeff and I arriving 2 weeks ago, we increased the population from 6 to 9. Then last week, Katie (another grad student from my research group), Mary, Craig (scientists from Stanford Research Institute, SRI, which is the company that actually runs the site) and John (also an SRI employee who used to be the site manager) came up. Another grad student, Steve was also supposed to come up with Katie, but they ran into bad ...

The past several days have been without update to my travel blog, but not for lack of anything to write about. It seems we are now in full swing, and I have had little down time. Most of the time, we work and sleep, but there have been a few exceptions. On Saturday, several of us took a trip to see the ice cap. If you look at Greenland on Google Maps, you will notice that most of it, except for the edges near the ocean, is white. This is the glacier that ...

Today was a good day. We had shipped up a pair of cross polarized frequency doubled Nd:YAG lasers earlier this spring for us to install upon our arrival in Greenland. The idea is to use them for lower altitude returns, because our high power Nd:YAG tends to saturate the detector below 20 km. We set to work early on, first just making sure the lasers still worked, then integrating it into the system. Yesterday, we were working on ...

Some might be wondering what in the world has caused me to go to Greenland, and what I am doing. Here I will attempt to explain my research. Warning: Many people will likely find the below entry to be very boring. Consider yourself warned. Why did you go to Greenland (Short Answer)? My research group has an atmospheric research facility in Greenland. Many researchers have facilities at the polar regions due to the unique atmospheric phenomena that occur at these latitudes. What ...

I had previously hoped to update this blog everyday, but I am beginning to question that I will have enough material every day to post. So don't hold it against me if my updates become less frequent. In the mean time, Sean will entertain you by posting conversations with himself on the comments. Today Jeff (my advisor) and I took a break from work in the evening and took a hike. We just took off from behind the ...