Fri, 28 Feb 1997If there was ever a picture that didn't do the scene justice, the one below is it. Hint: if you're ever in a position to see Greenland from the sea, bring a decent camera, and make sure you have a polarizing filter.
After breakfast, I wandered outside with a coat and binoculars. I was met at the door by bright, sharp sunlight: the sky was almost totally clear, with just a few tiny puffballs of cloud. ...There, rising above and reflected in the rippling mirage at the horizon, rose the highest peaks of Cape Desolation. Icebergs are said to resemble mountains rising from the sea, but it would be impossible to confuse these peaks with icebergs. Ice has an artistic frailty to it: it looks like a marblsculpture of a mountain rather than the mountain itself. Even the barest tips of Greenland's peaks were immense and ponderous; one could feel the hard rock hidden beneath the snow. Some more math using the ship's distance from shore when the peaks crossed the horizon tells me they're half a kilometer high. Which isn't much (especially for Greenland), but as we got closer it was apparent that the mountains were right along the shore: there were sheer cliffs in places, plunging nearly a thousand feet into the ocean. I've thought about how to describe the scene, and the best I can say in a few words is that it looked like the Himalayas rising from the pure blue sea. The mountains were snow-covered, with veins of brown and black rock showing through in the crevices and gullies of the mountainside. Between the peaks, we could see a smooth, arching curve of white against the sky, well back from shore: we're not sure if it was a cloud layer above the ice sheet, or the Greenland ice sheet itself, covering all of Greenland's interior, 10,000 feet high. I suspect it was the ice sheet, because the clouds were much darker in color, and this arching line didn't change shape over two hours.
We got one single day of beautiful weather, and it happened on the one day there was anything worth seeing. That's enough to satisfy me.
Below is a montage made from a
video made by Dan Torres, one of my shipmates. Click for a full-size image.
The pictures below are by Bob Pickart, chief scientist.
Photo credit: Bob Pickart
Photo credit: Bob Pickart
Photo credit: Bob Pickart
The CTD watch working that afternoon had the most gorgeous conditions imaginable to work in. But by the time I came on watch, the clouds and snow and swells were back. Note how glass-clear and flat the water is. The lack of swell is due to the gorgeous weather, but the smooth surface is due to the presence of "grease ice", tiny ice crystals floating in the water which dissipate capillary waves.
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