And we're off!

A few months ago, my work asked me to travel to Greenland to provide technical support for the PolarGrid project. The PG project is a joint effort between the Elizabeth City State University and Indiana University to provide technical support for projects that study glacier melting. This means that we provide computing clusters for data processing and we also go into the field with the teams whenever needed. These field missions have gone to Antartica and Chile, and the current field mission is at the Thule Air Field in Greenland.

The trip would entail 5 weeks in Greenland with the CRESIS team, and so many things had to be done before I could go. I had mounds of paperwork to do for travel and for NASA who is providing all the flight infrastructure for the Operation Ice Bridge mission. I had to find someone to watch the boys. Luckily their dad, with a blessing from Purdue, agreed to come to Bloomington to stay with them while I was gone. I had to pay my taxes and other end of the fiscal year type stuff. All this while other projects were ramping up at work meant I was wicked busy for the month leading up to the trip. Plus I was spending the week before my trip in Oneonta, NY visiting my friends Jason and Adriane, their toddler son Rowan, and their new born daughter Amelie. I didn't have much time to prepare before the trip was looming large.

So after kissing the boys goodbye and a week in NY, I headed to Palmdale, California. I had 6 bottles of Ommegang beer, three books from Terry Pratchet's Disc World series and a copy of Stephenson's Anathem, some movies, and my son Nick's Nintendo DS and a half a dozen games to keep me busy. I went to the Dryden Flight Research Center where a DC-8 awaited along with tons of scientific instruments to whisk us off to Greenland. I got there around 2pm and found no one else from the mission at the airfield, and so had to turn around and spend the day at the Palmdale Mall. Luckily a lovely lady at the Hilton Garden Inn watched my luggage while I went and drank beer at BJ's Restaurant Brewhouse. Purdue was on the TV playing Texas A&M and I think I was the only person in the bar interested in the game. Finally someone from the mission contacted me, and I headed back to the air field. I had to leave before the end of the game, but heard later that Purdue won. I left girl scout cookies for the ladies at the Hilton, and took a taxi to the airfield.

I was escorted inside the hangar after passing through security which only consisted of signing my name to a roster. Inside the hangar was the DC-8 all loaded up with equipment. Most of the seats had been removed, and periodically through out the plane, racks of equipment were bolted to the floor. Several instruments were installed in the cargo area of the plane including CRESIS's radar and a lidar. The seats that were in the airplane were first class seats that had 5-point harnesses instead of seat belts. Each seat also had a headset that anyone could use to communicate with the rest of the team, but mostly was used by the pilot to communicate with the researchers. After a short safety brief which included a description of a plane crash as a field of hot razor blades, we left around midnight.

Unlike the researchers on the plane who were running their instruments, I had no responsibilities, and I fell asleep immediately. The seats leaned back super far, and other than being cold, I slept very comfortably. I woke up just at dawn, and went up into the cockpit to watch the sun come up over the horizon. I had never been in the cockpit of such a large plane before, and the flight team was very friendly and let me hang out as long as I wanted. We were over the ocean, and it was completely frozen, but the ice wasn't flat. It was full of cracks, flows, cliffs, and mountains. Several of the researchers were madly taking data while we were over the ice, and I wandered around a bit and talked to several of the other teams. Michelle was with the LVIS project and showed me how they were using lidar to map the surface of the ice. Her husband Brian told me about the GRACE project which measures gravity so accurately that it can determine changes in the mass of the glaciers.

We landed in Thule around 2pm, and it was super cold. The temperatures are in the single digits this time of year. We began the long process of unloading all the gear. Luckily there is a free taxi service so it wasn't too terrible getting all the gear over to the dorm. I got a first floor room to setup as our machine room for all our computer gear, and a second floor room for sleeping - no one wants to sleep in the same room as a server and disk array. The dorm has fairly decent rooms, and each room has a TV, VCR, dorm refrigerator, microwave, and a coffee maker. The dorm also has a community kitchen, and the community bathrooms are nice as well with shower stalls that actually have locking doors. There's a washer and dryer in each bathroom and the dorm even provides the laundry soap. After taking a much needed shower, we went to dinner in the mess hall which had a large selection of good food. We also visited the supermarket which actually had green leaf lettuce, cucumbers, bell peppers, and strawberries. Then it was back to the dorm where after calling home, I spent the night installing ddwrt on a Cisco wireless router. There is internet in the common room/kitchen area, but it doesn't reach our rooms. I'm hoping to change that by boosting the antenna strength of my router. I went to sleep around 2am exhausted, and although I'm 950 miles above the Arctic Circle, I'm amazingly comfortable in this really inhospitable place.