| Summary: | Aboard the Swedish Icebreaker (IB) Oden, the Ryder 2019 Expedition, which the ExplorersClub officially designated as “Flag Expedition #51,” we successfully achieved our ambitious goals of scientifically investigating northern Greenland and creating the first ever maps of water depths in the ice-infested seas of the usually inaccessible and essentially unexplored Sherard Osborn Fjord, which connects the southern Lincoln Sea and the northern Nares Strait to the Ryder Glacier, one of the primary outlet glaciers draining the Greenland Ice Sheet.The expedition departed from the harbor of US Air Force Base Thule on August 5, 2019, and returned there on September 10th. During those 37 days, the international scientific party of 39 scientists, assisted by seven representatives from the Swedish Polar Research Secretariat, and 26 crew members, travelled 3369 nautical miles achieving all of their high-priority research goals on land and sea. One of the primary accomplishments was creating the first-ever, high-quality bathymetric map of large areas of previously uncharted waters. IB Oden was the first vessel (after Greenlandic Inuit in kayaks, of course) to enter these waters, and to reveal the fascinating and complicated shape of the seafloor that shows geological structuresand evidence of the powerful forces of the Greenland Ice Sheet and its marine outlet glaciers as they advanced and retreated during past glaciations. The map shows that the near vertical fjord walls, roughly 1 km high, continue downward, below sea level, with equal steepness, and nearly equal depths, as great as 900 meters in Sherard Osborn Fjord. The new map also shows the specific pathways by which warmer subsurface waters of Atlantic origin reach into the fjords of northern Greenland, where they come into contact with the floating glacial ice tongues and impact the rate at which the ice melts. The warmer waters have first circulated through the Arctic Ocean and into the Lincoln Sea, before reaching the fjord mouths. Another major achievement of the ...
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