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!

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