PHOTOS: Up close and personal with Greenland’s massive ice sheet

"Team Radar" at work. Students Rosie Leone, Aidan Stansberry and Ian MacDowell spent most of their five days on the ice using radar to map the bed — the rock and soil hundreds of feet below the ice sheet — which can affect the movement of the ice sheet.

Some of the surface of the Greenland ice sheet melts every summer, forming streams, rivers and lakes that often empty into holes and fissures. This is a normal process, but as humans warm the planet, surface melt is increasing and more water is flowing off the ice sheet than is accumulating. If the entire ice sheet melted, it would cause sea level to rise roughly 23 feet, inundating coastal areas around the world.

University of Montana glaciologist Joel Harper examines a deep crack in the ice sheet called a crevasse. His team of researchers is studying how the ice sheet moves, how quickly it might melt into the sea as the planet warms up, and how meltwater flowing into openings on its surface might contribute to that.

How does the shape of the underlying bed change how this enormous ice cube moves? That’s one of the questions this team is trying to answer. But the Greenland ice sheet is 10,000 feet thick in the center. “You can't go there. You can't see it. It's really hard to put instruments there,” Harper says. That’s why he has his students working on mapping the bed with radar. “We're just doing basic research trying to understand more about how the ice moves,” he says.

The work these scientists are doing intersects with a basic fact of human psychology: change is hard, and the faster the change, the harder it is. “It's all about the rate,” glaciologist Joel Harper says, and whether society will have more time or less to respond to a drastic rise in sea levels. “You know, if it takes three or four millennia to get a large amount of melt from Greenland into the ocean that's a completely different societal issue if its a century, or two, or three.”

The crew gathered for meals in a tent on the ice. University of Montana graduate student Rosie Leone says doing field work with her mentors is great experience for her future career in the sciences. She’s aiming to work as a hydrologist.

University of Wyoming glaciologist Neil Humphrey works on one of the tiny sensors the team sent down through a bore hole to collect information about the ice sheet bed. The Arctic may seem remote, Humphrey says, but changes here affect the whole planet. “We're talking about raising sea level 10, 20 feet. You're going to displace hundreds of millions of people. They're going to be upset. They're going to want to go somewhere better. A guaranteed way to end up needing to fight wars is to have millions of people displaced and angry ... This seems like a disaster that one might want to avoid.”

Workdays are long on research trips to the Greenland ice sheet. After five days of intense work, the team from the universities of Montana and Wyoming team packed up all the tents, food and gear, and waited for the helicopter to come pick them up. It was one of the only moments when the team had time to relax and take in the wonder of the place.