Pete Willcox has been sailing on Greenpeace ships for 28 years. He’s currently our skipper on the Arctic Sunrise off the coast of Greenland. This is the first in a series of Captain’s Blogs that we’ll be publishing throughout the three-month expedition to bear witness to the Arctic Meltdown caused by global warming.
Captain Pete Willcox looking at Petermann Glacier from the bridge of the Arctic Sunrise. © Greenpeace/Nick Cobbing
There is never a bad time to go out for a walk on the deck and enjoy the scenery. Because the sun is always up, there are some times that are better than others. And speaking of time, longitude up here in the Arctic, it ain’t what it used to be. At the equator, where we were this winter sailing the Amazon, a degree of longitude was 60 nautical miles. Up here it is nine.
Around midnight, the sun is in line with Petermann’s glacier wall, and behind us. This causes the sun to cast long shadows on the face of the canyon surrounding the glacier. The canyon walls are stratified limestone, with many colors and shades. They are connected by the undulating white glacier below them. The canyon walls are 1000 metres high, and the floor of Hall Basin (the sea bed) seems to be between 500 and 1000 meters, which means the whole canyon is… bloody big!
Looking at the glacier from our level on the bridge of the Sunrise, it does seem perfectly white. But even from the ship, when you look down at the near by melt pools, you can see black stuff on the bottom. In many places the back stuff heats up and melts further down into the glacier, sometimes in perfectly round circles. Most of the melt lakes that you see from the helicopter have black mud on a portion of them.
The black stuff is carbon from dust storms, wild fires, manmade pollution, and cosmic dust. I suspect that our scientists are having a bit of a laugh on us with the cosmic debris story, but at the moment they are sticking to it. Melanie, our fearless campaigner, went into one of the ponds the other day to collect some of the black mud. It will be sent to labs in Italy and the U.S. for analysis. I stuck my hand into one of the pools the other day. The stuff feels like sand, but is completely black.
The loss of "reflectivity" is one reason why the Arctic is changing so much faster than elsewhere. Obviously the sea ice reflects most of the warmth of the sun. The much dark ocean water does not. When the glaciers get turned to a color from cosmic dust or man made pollution, they melt much faster. Some of the black gunk is natural. Some is not. Our chemical testing of it will help us figure out how much is natural and how much is manmade.
The last week we have had a few days with temperatures up to 5C (40F). This has produced a number of waterfalls off the high cliffs along the glacier. I have been eyeing the clifftops for the last couple weeks. We have several cameras posted on them, and periodically they need servicing with the helicopter. My chance comes, and I jump at it. I like high places. Maybe it comes from working at a place – the ocean- where the biggest "mountain" is eight to ten meters. When I lived on Mallorca, one of my favorite things to do was to run up the hill behind the village. By the time I would get up to the ridgeline, I felt I was someplace special. I have the same feeling on the cliffs on the edge of the glacier, without the satisfaction of having gotten there on my own feet.
It’s quiet. A gentle breeze is blowing. For the first time I realize that the part of the glacier where the ship is tied up to is sticking out much further than the parts touching the canyon walls. Jason named the open part on the southwest side Manhattan Bay. The piece we are tied to is of similar size: about the size of Manhattan. I imagine the lower tip of Manhattan with the old Twin Towers. They would stick roughly half way up the side of the canyon walls. Midtown Manhattan would stick up roughly a third. Manhattan is seven miles long. The floating part of Petermann Glacier is fifty miles long. If you laid down on the floating section of Petermann, Manhattan would represented by your head. Petermann Glacier is about to be decapitated.
Nineteen years ago I sat on the edge of the Grand Canyon, feet hanging into space, drinking a bottle of wine with some friends. The cliff was not as high as that above Petermann. Here you can look strait down 2600 feet or 760 meters. At the Grand Canyon we were looking down about a third of that. But if you fall, after the first 50 meters, what’s the difference?
Here on Petermann, I do not walk up to the edge and sit down. I get on my belly and crawled until my nose was hanging in space. I grab a stone from near by and launch it. It goes down, and down, and down, and down, and down, and crashes and ricochets further. A second later I can hear the crack of the first bounce. I ease my way back from the edge, and realize I have had all the cheap thrills I will need for the rest of the week. Martin, our pilot, does not need any cheap trills of this nature, stands well back from the edge smoking his pipe and smiling away.
Being a helicopter pilot is not Martin’s first career. Rumor has it on the ship that he was a welder. This sparked my interest, as I have not known many welders that went on to be helicopter pilots.
Turns out that while Martin knows how to weld, he was a tool and die maker with an invention to his credit. Calling a tool and die maker a welder is sort of like calling Formula One champion Michael Schumacher a taxi driver. Having come close to starting an apprenticeship in tool and die making, I have great respect for the trade. And it is no stretch of the imagination to imagine switching from one trade to the other.
We stop on the ice on the way back. If you are into contour lines, you could die happy here. In between the melt steams, lakes, ponds, and rivers, the glacier is constantly different. Though it looks like snow, it feels like a crust that you cannot break through. It would make a challenging golf course. Hard to hit the fairway, though.
Then I hear a noise. It’s way too familiar. I look up and see the New York – Moscow express rumbling by on schedule (this is a joke, I really don’t know where it going). But I am disappointed. This is the first of anybody other than my shipmates I have seen in over three weeks.
