Expedition to Zackenberg field station, NE Greenland
We travelled to the remote Zackenberg field station in northeast Greenland in April to deploy a lander beneath sea ice in outer Young Sound.
This ambitious deployment required transporting all equipment from the Zackenberg field station to outer Young Sound (25 km distant) over sea ice by snowmobile. Additionally, we needed to cut out a large hole (approx. 160 cm * 120 cm) through 80 cm of snow (easy!) and 130 cm of sea ice (not easy!) to allow lowering the lander to the seabed.
The deployment went very smoothly with help from the Zackenberg logistics team. The weather was cold (-10 to -20 degC) but sunny round the clock (midnight sun!) with blue skies and little wind, providing the perfect conditions for deployment.
So what’s next?
The lander is installed in outer Young Sound at a depth of 26 m. The instrument is set to record data continuously for the next months, closely monitoring the sunlight environment and oxygen fluxes (as a measure of seafloor primary production and respiration) before, during, and after sea-ice breakup. If successful, this will be a one-of-a-kind dataset that will uniquely capture the shift from heterotrophy to autotrophy on the seafloor in this high-Arctic setting.
The instrument will be collected during the open water period in August. This project has been years in the making and we are thrilled to have successfully completed this complex task. Special thanks go to the Zackenberg logistics team for their support and enthusiasm for this project, and to Denmark’s Independent Research Fund for financing this expedition. We can’t wait to see what these measurements will reveal!
