In 2019, to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Swiss Camp, Koni had welcomed a group of VIPs at the camp in order to show them firsthand what was happening to the ice sheet, so that they would appreciate the potential impacts of Greenland's melt on the rise in sea levels across the world’s oceans. Koni was tireless in his attempts to drum the message home to politicians, to the public, and to other researchers that there was cause for serious concern.
Konrad Steffen (Koni), former Director of the WSL, as well as the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado Boulder and the scientific Director of the Swiss Polar Institute, was one of the world’s leading glaciologists and a leading authority on the Greenland Ice Sheet. Simon and Derek had accompanied him on his last fateful mission to Swiss Camp in August 2020, and it was with great emotion that the team found itself in Ilulissat again, preparing to head out there. They were to be witnesses to the end of an era.Įvidence that the summer melt on the ice sheet was accelerating had been growing in recent years, and Koni was tireless in sharing this message. He had spent just over 30 years studying the changes happening to the Greenland Ice Sheet, and in particular to the Jakobshaven Glacier ablation zone. In fact, Swiss Camp sat close to this point so critical for the assessment of the changes in the flow of the glacier, which emerges in a bay to the south of Ilulissat, about 80 kilometres away. On the 19th of July 2021, Alain Hubert and Nighat Johnson-Amin of the International Polar Foundation flew to Ilulissat on the west coast of Greenland to assist Simon Steffen and Derek Houtz of the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) in Zürich in their mission to remove the remains of the Swiss Camp research station from its location on the Greenland Ice Sheet.
0 kommentar(er)
