Suzan-Lori Parks blogging old-school as we cross into the Arctic Circle, heading towards Kangerlussuaq.
An amazing birds-eye view of Greenland’s glaciers as we approach Kangerlussuaq.
On the chartered plane on the way to Kangerlussuaq to meet the boat I am sitting next to the author Lemn Sissay, who writes witty and beautiful poetry amazingly quickly. He is reading poetry and I am reading my new camera manual, which sums up a few things. Then we start seeing poetry in the camera manual: focus point, focus lock, release mode, live view, auto sensitivity, aperture priority,exposure compensation, colour space, interrupt interval, white balance.
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Well after an eventful trip out here including radar problems at London delaying our flight by 4 hours leaving us with 2 minutes to spare before Heathrow stopped all outgoing flights for the night (bit of a close shave that one), and luggage chaos as 43 people and 1500kgs of kit descended on 3 airports in 24 hours, we’ve made it! Whilst on the small plane from Iceland to Greenland, numerous photographs were taken of the eastern Greenland coast moving up over the icecap itself.
The fantastic aerial views of the glaciers feeding down from the icecap provoked a multitude of questions about glacier behaviour, stress and strain distributions and icecap thickness and age. A quiet discussion with a few people about the above questions soon resulted in filming and recording by both the American film crew and Quentin Cooper from Radio 4.
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Early morning and last minute emails are on the crew’s minds.
The polar regions hold a profound, and even primal, fascination for so many of us. In the case of the Arctic, real journeys of adventure from Lief Erikson to Parry and Fienes, and imaginary ones from Jules Verne to Philip Pullman have added layers of meaning to its magnetic attraction, so to speak. So an invitation to go there would have been the best gift ever, even without the new and ominous message coming from the arctic. For the arctic is the harbinger of what is happening to the global climate. David Buckland, who thought up and made happen the Cape Farewell expeditions, compares it to the miner’s canaries that foretold of the presence of deadly gases underground.
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