During the last months, the Green2Ice Copenhagen team has been busy preparing for the 2026 field season in Greenland: Applying for Greenlandic government permits, ongoing coordination with participants and associated projects, info letters and field plan have been written, and all drill, scientific and logistical equipment needed in the first half of the season, has been shipped from Copenhagen to Kangerlussuaq. On April 28, the first two FOMs travelled to Kangerlussuaq and began setting up everything for the first team to arrive.
The Green2Ice project plans for the 2026 field season:
After the GRIP casing was found and confirmed to be intact through video inspection in 2025, the main tasks for the deep drilling operation in 2026 are to establish a drill site, to log the borehole and to drill through the remaining part of the deep ice to bedrock. When the deep drilling at the GRIP site was terminated in 1991 at 3029 m depth, the deepest ice cores retrieved had a brownish colour due to a high content of impurities that is typically found in ‘basal ice’ close to bedrock. The bedrock was, however, not reached at the time. The bedrock temperature is estimated to be approximately -8° to -9°C, which is well below the pressure-melting point. A first goal for this season will be to log the borehole and obtain a temperature profile. A second goal is to reach bedrock by drilling through the remaining basal ice. If successful, attempts will be made to drill into the underlying bedrock or sediment below the ice sheet using a rock drill. The processing of the ice core in the field will be held at a minimum. The ice core will be logged and packed in ice core boxes in 55 cm sections without further processing or analysis. We may choose to scrape off water isotope samples from the outside of the core in order to obtain a preliminary climate profile of the deepest ice. The handling of the core from drilling to packing into boxes will be done under ‘red light condition’. This is a necessary measure for potential future OSL (Optically Stimulated Luminescence) dating of the basal ice that cannot be exposed to strong light sources. The full processing of the ice core is planned to happen at AWI, Bremerhaven or in Copenhagen at a later stage.
Associated plans for the 2026 field season:
In addition to the main Green2Ice activities, a number of associated scientific projects and several tasks related to camp construction or development are scheduled for the 2026 field season:
Installing solar power for the main dome (Jørgen Peder Steffensen, UCPH)
As part of an infrastructure upgrade through the project Greenland Integrated Observing System (GIOS), we will mount solar power panels on the main dome. After several years of carefully recording the 24-hour summer sunlight, suitable Photo Voltaic (PV) panels have been selected and transported to Greenland. The PV-panels will be mounted on the dome in May and early June.
ICELINK: Shallow drilling (Johannes Freitag, AWI)
The primary scientific objective is to place current climatic trends – specifically temperature and mass balance – into a robust historical context. The project aims to retrieve in-situ data by drilling shallow firn cores (3-inch cores, 40–50 m depth) at selected historical sites (“Alphabet cores”), up to 200km south of GRIP, and also near the Dye-3 deep drilling site in South Greenland. This approach will make newly acquired ice core data overlap with and thus extend existing climate time series from these historical sites and thereby provide long-term records covering the most recent global warming. The operational strategy is defined as a highly mobile, airborne field campaign with AWI Basler aircraft. Utilizing Kangerlussuaq Airport and the GRIP field camp as logistics hubs, the campaign will employ a transportable, sledge-mounted drill (based on the “Hans Tausen” principle) to extract cores within tight 10-hour operational windows.
PFAS in snow (Eliza Cook, UCPH)
The Villum Funded ‘PFAS in Snow’ project is working in collaboration with the ICELINK shallow drilling campaign to collect a couple of parallel shallow snow/firn cores at a site approximately 15 km SW of GRIP camp, capturing snow of the past century.
The project plans to drill two replicate cores with the UCPH shallow drill, a couple of meters apart and approximately 35 m in length to capture the last 100 years. The first 35 m core will be used for PFAS analysis, and the second will be used for dating and CFA. Furthermore, we will also obtain a short 10 m core from the same site with a Kovaks hand auger, that has a wider (15 cm) core diameter and will be used for PFAS method development.
GRIP water isotope trench (Hans Christian Steen-Larsen, Uni. Bergen)
Long trenches for the purpose of sampling water stable isotopes in and along the walls have been dug in both Greenland (EastGRIP) and Antarctica (e.g., Kohnen, Dome C, Little Dome C). Several vertical sample profiles along a trench wall reveal both a spatial and temporal recording of the stable water isotope signal in the snow. While ice cores represent a single location in space and time, a trench provides information on the processes that drive the recording of the climate signal in the ice core. Specifically, the role of wind redistribution for generating noise in the record, the role of sublimation for altering the initial precipitation fingerprint, and the role of interstitial diffusion on dampening seasonal amplitude. These processes are all playing a role in creating the climate fingerprint found in the ice core record.
Seis-Sustain: Vibro-Seismic Truck (Nanna Karlsson, GEUS)
The Seis-Sustain project aims to create a platform at GRIP for scientific work with a VibroSeismic truck. Once fully established, the platform will support seismic investigations of the geology under the ice sheet. Information from this study will increase our understanding of the history and dynamic behaviour of the ice sheet, as well as its role in sediment transport to the margins.
The project runs from 2026 through 2029, and during this first season of the project, we plan to move a VibroSeis from Denmark to GRIP and prepare it for operations under the very low temperatures prevalent in the interior of the ice sheet. Technical staff from GEUS and AWI will perform these tasks in June and July.
AWS station system (Greenland Climate Network, former PARCA) maintenance (Nanna Karlsson)
During the annual maintenance of the Automated Weather Stations in N-Greenland, the GRIP camp will be re-fuelling station and base for the GC team for a few days in June. The GC team uses a Twin Otter aircraft to visit the weather stations. The plan for the 2026 season is to put up a station at Site A (in collaboration with ICELINK) and visit 3-4 stations for maintenance.
Read more in the Green2Ice field plan: https://www.green2ice.eu/field-season-plans/
Green2Ice logistics coordinators, Marie Kirk and Iben Koldtoft & Green2Ice PI, Anders Svensson
