Date: Fri, 28 Feb 1997 09:20:05 +0000 (GMT)
From: Jason Goodman <sci5@knorr.whoi.edu>
To: seadiary@MIT.EDU
Message-Id: <Pine.SUN.3.91.970228074409.20911B-100000@mike.knorr.whoi.edu>
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60 18' N, 48 37' W
Temp: -6 C, Winds: nw, 12 m/s
Seas: building
  The name of the place is "Cape Desolation": who could hope to find a 
better one?  

  Our third cross-sea section began off the coast of Cape Desolation,
Greenland.  We steamed toward it all last night; as I mentioned in my last
letter, the sky began clearing early in the morning, and I was able to see
Comet Hale-Bopp.  The sun came up as we began a rapid-fire sequence of
XBTs while approaching the continental shelf.  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.  Icebergs notched
the horizon to port and starboard... not gnarled, wave-sculpted forms I'd
seen on the Labrador coast, but tall jagged cliffs of white ice hinting at
blue inside, and with the layered patterns of glacial snow accumulation
patterned on the faces.  I went up to the bridge and checked the distance
on the radar, measured their size in my binoculars, and did a little math:
some were 20-30 meters high.  (People who'd been to Antarctica weren't
impressed, but I was.) The contrast between the lit and shadowed faces in
the morning sun was remarkable.  I tried to take pictures of the nearest
ones by holding the camera to one eyepiece of my binoculars while sighting
through the other... I hope it works. 
  Two hours later, I went out again, and looked ahead of the ship.  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 marble
sculpture 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. 
  The ship stopped about 10 miles offshore.  The weather remained
gorgeous, with blue skies, temperature just below freezing, no wind, and
calm seas.  The captain opened all decks to let people go look outside...
which was a nice but pointless gesture, since everyone was out anyway.  We
stretched our science activities at this point as much as possible, then
turned around and began our transect. (this is, after all, a research
vessel, not a tour boat.) We'd have gone closer, but someone forgot to
bring the coastal zone maps.  The captain at dinner sounded like he'd
seriously considered sailing into one of the fjords between the mountains. 
  As we sailed away, we crossed ribbons of pancake ice and grease ice. 
Grease ice is water in which tiny ice crystals are just forming: the
crystals damp out the tiny capillary waves on the surface, making the
surface change from rough and ripply to mirror-smooth.  The swells rode
under this mirror skin: it looked like waves drawn by mediocre-quality
rendering software.  When these tiny crystals coalesce, they try to make
flat sheets on the surface, but the waves break these sheets up into round
plates with raised edges formed by their bumping together, called pancake
ice.  We'd see ribbons kilometers long and hundreds of meters wide, formed
of millions of nearly identical 20-cm disks.  I stood on deck most of the
day, watching sea ice form, icebergs drift, and the Greenland coast
disappear.  At sunset, the mountains were still visible, the snow and rock
turned pink and umber in the dimming sunlight.  The icebergs on the
horizon divided into camps: those with a sunlit face toward us shone like
tall white sails, while those with a shadowed face toward us looked like
obsidian towers.  After dinner, I went to bed, having been awake for 24
hours.
  It turns out I shouldn't have.  After sunset, the northern lights came
out.  I missed the best part, but what I saw was still the second-best
northern lights of my life.  (Some of you may remember a night on Bell
Field in early 1992.) These didn't move around as much as some I've seen,
but they were by far the brightest.  Four or five curtains of intense
glowing green, bright enough to occlude all the nearby stars, with red
Mars shining between two green curtains, and an increasing number of
clouds masking the lights here and there.  Half an hour later, the sky was
a solid deck of clouds.  When we started working outside an hour later, it
had begun to snow, and the wind had picked up, and the sea began to
foam... it was suddenly ordinary Lab Sea weather. 
  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.