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Sunday 10 June 2012

FIRST CAMPING IN -15 DEGREES!

Just back from Greenland and had an awesome shoot. Many firsts for me including my first time camping - own tent, thermal mattress a balmy -15 degrees! Not bad effort for first time with NO toilet and only flat ice, no where to hide - did you know there are no trees in Greenland, really quiet inconvenient especially being a female! Travelled from the far north to the far south to look at what is happening to the icesheet and glaciers to learn about the rate of accelerated melting. We lived in Qaanaaq for 7 days, with bag toilets, really another first but the people were amazing, and walking in the street at 2am with sunglasses on was yet another first for me...sun never sets for many months, so you really have to remember to put yourself to bed. Thanks to Alun Hubbard and his team at S10 camp for a good pot of porridge with strawberry jam and cinamon sugar, yet another first and cold coffee quite a Hubbard special. Foggy weather in IIlulisate enabled us to twist Jason Boxes arm and ride with him to Swiss Camp - met the amazing Steffen Konrad at Swiss Camp and dropped of some bulding supplies for their remodeling works due to shifting iceflows, they are having to rebuild Swiss Camp- it has moved nearly 30kms over the last 15 years.  Dirk and the team from GEUS kindly drove us out to the edge of the ice-cap along the bumpiest road you will every travel on - and then we hauled our gear over the hills and up onto the icesheet for a few nights. This time we had a toilet of types, a blue barrel with a realy toilet seat on it - a bit strange to see this on the horizon and to see the interest it raised from the artic foxes who appeared when you least expected them to check you out! Greenland was an amazing adventure, things magically happened, and we really saw first hand the accelerated changes that are happening on the icesheet, the glaciers which curtain the ocean and the sea-ice which is retracting at rates outside the conservative models from the last Climate Change Summit. Good News is that they are starting a gardening club in Nuuk for the first time - it is getting so warm in the summer now they are going to try to grow small trees, fresh herbs and strawberries.

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