The journey is a research expedition that will provide crucial knowledge about the Greenlandic ocean currents and animal and organism life at a time when the ice is melting fast and more water is being added.
Søren Rysgaard is the leader of the research group that will leave. He is a daily professor at Aarhus University.
– We really have to sail long distances, 6000 kilometers, and we sail fast, so we are able to make measurements that in the old days took a long time.
– I think this will give quite new knowledge about the area. It is not a quick fix, because there are many glaciers and fjords. But we get a snapshot, he says.
It is the Arctic Command that is adding the boat. The inspection ship sails from the west coast of Greenland to the Ella Ø fjord system in East Greenland and from there to the Faroe Islands, where the trip ends.
Currently, the area around Greenland is hit by a heat wave. 20 degrees heat causes the ice to melt at an alarming rate, new figures show, as the media LiveScience has described.
They are taken from the Danish site polarportal.dk, and they show that since 27 July, approximately 8.5 billion tonnes of ice have been melted per day.
These are wild numbers, says William Colgan, senior researcher at the research institution Geus, which among other things deals with geological surveys of the Arctic.
– It’s extreme. The degree of meltdown is unusual, he says.
He believes the expedition is important because it stretches over a long area where good results can be gleaned about molten ice and changes in water currents.
The type of heat wave that is currently melting the ice was previously only seen every 250 years, says William Colgan. But the current heat wave is, according to the researcher, the third time in the last 15 years.
The trip, which thus begins on Monday, is made possible by technology that can emerge where people cannot move.
Among other things, self-propelled measuring robots must be used, which can be carried by drones in glacier areas.
– It is wildly dangerous to measure at such a glacier. Some of them are the size of the Eiffel Tower, says Søren Rysgaard and therefore calls the technology crucial for getting measurements home:
– We have all heard that it is getting warmer and the ice sheet is melting. You can do many scenarios via computers, but there are lots of things you can not know exactly about what happens to the water that flows into the ocean.
Sebastian Mernild, professor of climate change and vice-rector at the University of Southern Denmark, also supports the project, which takes place during a period of unusual ice melting around Greenland.
– What we have seen since the 1980s is an increasing net loss for the ice sheet.
– Over time, we have seen more freshwater runoff from the inland ice, and this will to some extent affect the North Atlantic currents and the Gulf Stream.
– So it is interesting that they go on such an expedition to investigate what we can measure ourselves against, says Sebastian Mernild.
Source: The Nordic Page