The crew of the Swedish research icebreaker Oden estimated it had just a 20% chance of reaching its destination—the remote Victoria Fjord in North Greenland—as it traveled north last month. On the final push, those aboard felt the vessel ram repeatedly into thick ice in the Lincoln Sea. At times, the ship traveled at a snail’s pace of just 2.3 miles per hour (3.7 kilometers per hour) through the ice.
“You feel it, the heavy shaking. It’s very noisy and quite rocky,” said Nina Kirchner, a glaciologist at Stockholm University and one of two chief scientists for the expedition. Though the journey was challenging, Kirchner said she was glad to see that thick summer sea ice still exists above the Arctic Circle.
“Even though it may seem to be the most remote part of Greenland, it might actually be the most relevant part of Greenland for sea level rise.”
After several days, Oden successfully reached Victoria Fjord, becoming the first large-scale research vessel to study the fjord or the adjacent C. H. Ostenfeld Glacier. “Luck was on our side this time,” wrote Kirchner and the expedition’s other chief scientist, Martin Jakobsson, in a blog post.
The interdisciplinary team of about 40 researchers, including glaciologists, biologists, geochemists, and marine geologists, was there to study the cryosphere. The data will help scientists understand how North Greenland glaciers contribute to the overall melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet, a crucial component for projecting future sea level rise in the region and globally.
“Even though it may seem to be the most remote part of Greenland, it might actually be the most relevant part of Greenland for sea level rise,” said Eric Rignot, a glaciologist at the University of California, Irvine, who is not involved with this summer’s expedition. “Until we explore these fjords and collect a lot of observations, it’s very difficult to understand the evolution of glaciers and project how they’re going to change.”
Fjord Features
As the climate warms, the 656,000-square-mile (1.7-million-square-kilometer) Greenland Ice Sheet is melting, flowing in all directions to the ocean. The northwestern part of the ice sheet drains via a few main glaciers, including Petermann, Ryder, and C. H. Ostenfeld.
The behavior of these individual glaciers offers insight into the movement of the Greenland Ice Sheet as a whole, which is critical to projecting future sea level rise, Kirchner said.
Scientists aboard Oden had previously collected data at Petermann Glacier in 2015, and in 2019, Oden was the first research vessel to reach Ryder Glacier.
This August, the ship and its crew set out to collect a wide variety of samples and data, taking sediment cores from the fjord, measuring ocean temperature, mapping the geology of the ocean floor, imaging the structure of the glacier, and sampling driftwood and shrubs for growth ring analysis.
“In these fjords, it’s a bit like ‘Measure everything you can, everything is important,”’ Rignot said.
Altogether, the data collected will show a picture of the past and current dynamics of the glacier and will improve the ability of numerical models to project future glacier behavior, climate changes, and sea level rise, Kirchner said. “It’s the old principle, garbage in, garbage out. We need to put in the best data that we have to get the best possible output.”
“These are absolutely fundamental data to understand the glacier system,” Rignot said.
Bathymetric Insights
Previous research—mainly using satellite and land-based measurements—on the three glaciers has shown they respond to climate change differently. “They are neighbors, so you could expect them to behave in the same way in response to climate forcing…but they don’t,” Kirchner said. Scientists think that differences in the shape of the seafloor in fjords adjacent to the glaciers strongly control glacier behavior because features on the seafloor dictate where and how warmer water can reach a glacier.
Data from the expedition have already indicated a large high point on the floor of the fjord, which may partially shield the glacier from an inflow of warmer water, said Jakobsson, who is a marine geologist at Stockholm University. Further analysis will hopefully give more insight into how the seafloor is affecting the glacier, he said.
“We collected much more data than I had dared to hope for.”
The seafloor maps beneath Victoria Fjord will also contribute to a long-term mapping project, Seabed 2030, that aims to fully chart Earth’s seafloor. The data collected for the project are freely available to the public. “Modelers will get access to this data instantly,” Jakobsson said. The team’s bathymetric research will “add valuable data to the definitive map of the ocean floor,” said Jamie McMichael-Phillips, director of the Seabed 2030 project, in a statement.
Oden has exited Victoria Fjord and is now on its return journey, first to Pituffik, Greenland, where scientists will disembark, and then back to Sweden. “We were super successful,” Jakobsson said. “We collected much more data than I had dared to hope for.”
—Grace van Deelen (@GVD__), Staff Writer
Citation: van Deelen, G. (2024), Swedish icebreaker is the first to dig into Greenland’s remote Victoria Fjord, Eos, 105, https://doi.org/10.1029/2024EO240411. Published on 13 September 2024.
Text © 2024. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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