“ There's no place on earth that's changing faster — and no place where that change matters more — than greenland. ”
- Bill McKibben, Rolling Stone Magazine
The first-ever Greenland expedition relying on crowd
source funding aims to answer the 'burning question':
How much does wildfire and industrial soot darken
the ice, increasing melt?
source funding aims to answer the 'burning question':
How much does wildfire and industrial soot darken
the ice, increasing melt?
While watching wildfires raging across his home state of Colorado, climatologist Jason Box was struck – could the dark wildfire soot contribute to the Greenland melting?
Dark Snow is a field and lab project to measure the impact of changing wildfire and industrial soot on snow and ice reflectivity. Soot darkens snow and ice, increasing solar energy absorption, hastening the melt of the “cryosphere”.
Fossil fuel combustion creates carbon emissions that increase atmospheric thickness, warming climate. The occurrence of wildfire increases with climate warming, increasing soot loading of the atmosphere. Some of this soot is transported through the atmosphere and is deposited on glaciers, lowering their reflectivity, increasing solar energy absorption, increasing melt rates.
Why field work and your donation is important
We expect that our findings will demonstrate a strong sensitivity of ice melt to snow impurities, through the multiplying effect of the albedo feedback, especially black carbon soot. This will help lawmakers build the case that it is important to limit industrial soot and limit climate change, which increases wildfire soot.
Box calculates the minimum cost of the field campaign is $125,000, 2/3 of which is an air charter of the ski-equipped airplane. We’re faced with a remaining fund raising goal of $75k, minimum.
Surface melting on Greenland has expanded greatly since the early 1980s. Driven by a combination of elevated greenhouse gas concentrations and a cleaner atmosphere, the latter an ironic effect of the Clean Air Act. Increased melting has doubled Greenland ice melting, increasing the rate of sea level rise from 0.4 mm per year between 2000 and 2006 to 0.8 mm per year 2006-2012. By the end of this century, scientists calculate global sea level rise between 1 and 2 meters (3.3 to 6.6 ft), creating a colossal problem for hundreds of coastal cities around the world.
The Dark Snow expedition team is made up of scientists, researchers, and creatives committed to understand the impact of wildfire and industrial black carbon soot on the darkening of snow and ice, enhancing melting.
Dark Snow has been featured in articles by NBC News, Huffington Post, Slate, The Guardian, and more. Click Read More to check them out.
- Prepare and gather science equipment including a field spectrometer, snow and ice coring device, and snow metrics kit.
- Travel to Iqualuit, on Baffin Island, Nunavut from home locales in California, Ohio, Michigan, Vermont and rendezvous with Dash-6 "Twin Otter" ski-equipped airplane and flight crew.
- Organize cold weather survival kit.
- Ferry team from Iqualuit to Kangerlussuaq, Greenland.
- Fly to and land at sampling sites high on the inland ice sheet.
- At each site collect snow samples from a snow pit and obtain snow cores to a minimum depth of the previous year's snow surface, and record snow properties.
- Transport of team and snow samples to Greenland's capital Nuuk, where the team will rest after hustling at field sites.
- Return to Iqualuit, then to respective home locales to start the data analysis and reporting phase of campaign.
At this part of the ice sheet, where the loss of winter snow during each melt season exposes impurity-rich bare ice, the surface reflectivity drops from 85% to 30%. Consequently, most of the 24 hour sunlight goes into ice melt. In this Dark Zone, the impact of soot manifests strongest in a self reinforcing feedback loop that Box’s research shows has doubled melt rates in the past decade.
High on the inland ice sheet where melting is rare, our satellite data show surface darkening making us suspect wildfire and industrial soot are to blame. Darkening here promotes snowpack heating, bringing earlier melt, keeping melt going longer. Here is where this feedback is changing the ice sheet in surprising ways, leading to complete surface melting in year 2012. Without the impact of soot, it's fair to expect that melting would not have been as extensive nor intense.
Kangerlussuaq
