Jökull - 31.12.2001, Qupperneq 70

E. Lyn Lewis
Figure 3. Camped on the ice with a snow block wall to protect from wind. Note the “clean” and “dirty” ice
surfaces, a result of the irregular deposition of volcanic ash. - Tjaldstaður á jöklinum. Ojafnt yfirborðið gerði
sleðadráttinn mun erfiðari.
Figure also shows the rock fragments embedded in
the ice for a few hundred metres above the ice edge,
which meant that on the morning of the fifth day we
packed our two loads up this distance to the clear ice
and there assembled the sledge.
More than forty-five years have elapsed since
we went onto the ice and for thirty of these I led
oceanographic research teams, operating from the sea
ice, to collect data from the Arctic Ocean and the
channels of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Having
worked outside in the cold, darkness and blizzards
of midwinter at 75°N as well as in the delightful 24
hour sun of late spring, it is now so easy for me to
criticise our equipment and techniques. The runners
on the sledge were about 4cm wide, good for the
hard ice or strastrugi. We brought 15 cm wide strips
of aluminum sheet and could screw them onto the
entire length of the runners for use on a soft surface.
Almost immediately we had to install these strips -
they were never taken off! Pulling the sledge uphill
over the soft snow was very hard work and the in-
tense solar radiation forced us to keep our bodies co-
vered. We had to put glacier cream on all exposed
areas of skin, including under the chin where one may
get burned due to radiation reflected from the ice. The
sun melted the snow so that we progressed through a
sort of “snow soup” on the surface of the ice. Slowly
but surely our boots filled with ice water; we traveled
with frying bodies and freezing feet, pulling a cross
between a snow plough and a sledge! Two years later
we were on skis in Svalbard, our home-built sledges
now had 10 cm wide teflon coated fibreglass runners,
with protruding steel edges to grip on clear ice and we
travelled at night!
But back to the Vatnajökull. We had climbed up
onto the ice about 16km south of a nunatak named
68 JÖKULL No. 51