26th June 2008

Since I wote my first entry to the blog life’s been pretty busy… On monday I flew to copenhagen to meet with the rest of the mapping team & have a group dinner in the evening. For those who haven’t been, Copenhagen is a great city – vibrant, pretty neat & tidy and of great amusement to anyone with a sense of toilet humour. Words & names such as ‘BOGHANDEL’ (bookseller) and ‘MADKUNST’ (not got a clue, but find it pretty funny) can be found on all street corners.

Anyway, on Tuesday we flew to Kongerhussaq in Greenland, which is a large airstrip north of the Arctic Circle, and then on south to Nuuk, which is the capital cuty. There we boarded a boat called Rink (looks like a converted fishing trawler) and made our way south to Buksefiarde where we have a base camp.

The weather was great, offering great views of the fjords and icebergs that we passed. On the way we stopped at a small island that we had to get to by zodiac (small, fast, semi-rigid boat stored on Rink) to do a bit of geology, but we didn’t stop for long as we still had several hours ahead of us on Rink.

After sailing for 8 or so hours, we arrived at Buksefiarde powerstation where our base is. Some guys have already been at this camp, situated at the end of this long and winding fjord for a week or so. We offloaded around half of the people on board Rink and then the group of us who are working even further south stayed on board and sailed through the night to Fiskanesset.

Runk does have small cabins right at the bottom of the ship, but the engine is so loud and shakes the ship so much that it’s hard to get a really good night’s sleep. When we woke in the morning, fog was covering the fjord and the water was really still, however the fog lifted fairly quickly leaving all the hills and islands around the edges of the lakes with their lower halves covered by fog and their tops exposed, pointing up to the big blue sky.

As soon as we got into the harbour of this small village we craned our kit off the ship (personal kit, tents, food, office & geological supplies, kitchen equipment …) and transported it by AVT (quad bike) to the helipad. Then we had a relatively short helicoptor flight to the island we’ve got our camp set up on.

There are four of us in the cmap – each of a different nationality. Ali is Canadian/Turkish, Per is Danish & Panlina is Sweedish. We all have a tent each and a communal kitchen tent that is shaped much like a wigwam. We get out water from the lake that we look on to, and the water is good enough to drink straight from it, without filtering/boiling.

Today was our first full day of work in the field. The weather’s been great (12 – 15 degress, sunny and a slight breeze to keep the flies away) and, as we heard over our field radio this evening in a report from base camp, more is on it’s way.

*To finish the setting off, the camp is surrounded on all sides by large hills, between which more lakes can be found*

With a bit of luck our field work on this part of the island will be finished half a day early giving us some time to go and explore the bits we’ve not been to or climb some of the hills.

Finally, not seen any wildlife so far. There are probably some foxes around and some birds, but it doesn’t look like we’re to find musk ox or caribou here. Maybe we will at the next place though…

P.S. Woke up last night at 12:30 (according to the clock), which sent me into panic because I thought it was 12:30 midday (not midnight) and everyone else was out working. So, I went back to sleep after deciding that they’d probably check on me when they came back for lunch!

P.P.S. You can send texts free to my satellite phone on +881641435325 from www.iridium.cana if you want to/have any questions, but the phone won’t let me reply back.

Catch you soon!

S.

15,500 miles still to go

For those of you who haven’t yet heard, I’ve got quite a busy summer ahead starting with 5 weeks work in Greenland, then 5 or so days back in the U.K. to remember what summer is like and finishing with 9 weeks work in Mongolia with a multinational mining company, possibly including a few days in Beijing.  I quite enjoyed keeping a diary when working in Arctic Canada last year and few people around the place have been persuading me to keep a blog whilst around the world this summer.

Sorry to dissappoint you all so early on, but I’m going to try an not bang on about the rocks a lot (although there is some really exciting stuff in Greenland).  Instead I’m going to try and give you a feeling of the people I meet, the land I will be living on and working from, the wildlife, scenery, weather and anything else out there that seems interesting.  Updates from Greenland will be pretty irregular.  In the field I’ll have a satellite phone and a field radio (it looks like on of the old WWII sets with a few more knobs and switches and slightly smaller batteries) but no computer or internet facilities.  Instead I’ll write the enteries by hand, pass them on to the helicopter pilot when my camp gets moved and then Joe Hewlett has kindly agreed to update the blog from them.

The work in Greenland will be a mixture of mapping, checking, sampling and all other sorts of field work for the Geological Survey fo Greenland.  I’m going to be based in a small 2 person fly camp (myself and a guy from Canada) for the 5 weeks.  We should get moved around different parts of SW Greenland mainly by helicopter every four or so days.  Food will be of the freeze-dried variety, supplied in bespoke cardboard boxes labelled either A, B, or C to ensure that there is some variety in our diets.

Anyway, I could go on for ages about what we’ll be doing out there, but I’m sure that it will be written about over the next 5 weeks or so.  Just to wrap up for the moment, I’ll let you know the travel plans for the next few days in case I don’t get chance to write a new post.  Tomorrow it’s going to be Heathrow to Copenhagen with a meeting in the afternoon there, and probably the usual field saftey inductions etc etc.  Then on Tuesday I fly with the crew from Copenhagen to Kangerlussuaq, which is a large runway strip just inside the Arctic Circle on the west coast of Greenland.  From there we’ll head to Nuuk, the capital, and board a converted fishing trawler to take us to the base camp.  I’m not too sure how we then get into the field from there, but it will either be by helicopter, zodiac (small fast semi-rigid boat) or by a mixture of the two.

Whilst I’m out there, add any comments if you want to – I’ll try and get them sent to me by post or some other method.  Finally, midges and mosquitos are rife and horrid.  To keep your interest up, I’m launching a competition that’s open to all readers.  To be in with a chance of winning, in no more than 20 words anwser the following question by adding a comment to this blog entry:

What is the most effective original way to get rid of the little beasties (mosquitoes)?

Suggestions must present no unreasonable danger to human life and can involve the use of standard camping / field equipment.  All suggestions will be field tested and the winner will be the luck recipient of a sample of one of the oldest rocks on the planet.

Catch you soon and keep checking back for another update!