Greenland Expedition: the deets

Howdy, folks.

Here is an update that’s been a while in the making!

If all goes well, our leaving date will be April 28th. Our team will head out onto the actual ice around May 4-5th, leaving from Narsarsuaq. Due to logistical, wind, and life considerations, we’ve changed up our route, so we’ll now be completing a kind of triangle, starting and ending in Narsarsuaq, and covering ~1400 km over the ice.

photo credit: https://greenland.net/windsled/photo-video-2016/

I’ll be working with Dr. Jed Sparks at Cornell University to collect some wee samples, for nice little stories on stable isotope analysis. Our first focus will be on changes in human physiology, and our secondary set of samples will deal with snowfall mapping across the ice sheet. Classroom outreach remains my main focus, and is so fun (so if you’ve got teacher friends, holler and share <3, and we’ll see what kind of madness we can drum up for your kiddos).

Madness.

The chief scientist on our expedition is Lucia Hortal Sanchez, an astrobiologist at Freie Universität Berlin. I’ll also be involved with her projects from the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, and Spain’s Centro de Astrobiologia (https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/news/spains-centro-de-astrobiologia/).

If you’re looking for classroom talks, I’m mostly available during the month of April, and then for a short time post-expedition, in the latter half of June! Feel free to reach out for the fall semester; my schedule is my own (mostly), and although I’ll hopefully be on trail in Canada, I’m open to exploring our options.

In between April and June… expect nothing. For really special humans (probably you), I might be able to set up a quick daily update, even if it’s just GPS coordinates- and one of the possibilities I’m looking into is legitimate satellite messaging, so if I can find a loving co-author, I might be able to do some real (if brief) updating from the ice.

The sled, on past expeditions!

Are you excited? I hope you’re excited. Please be excited for me. I, myself, am rather horrified and appalled. Who knew that abandoning students in 2017, to go be a homeless vagrant in the woods, would lead us to such a unique and glamorous juncture? Not I, Watson.

Not I.

Stay warm, stay well,
yer buddy Sail

As a final note, I’ve worked like a mad thing all pandemic, so with the $7000 y’all raised last year with Paypal and GoFundMe (like bosses), and my COVID earnings, costs are fully covered.

However, if you’d like to contribute towards this effort, so maybe I can use my own money to buy pizza and shoes later on down the IAT, click here or scan the below QR code for donations through paypal:

Keep being wonderful.