Oh, how I love a good ghost town! In fact, love is what I associate with ghost towns, as Mark and I fell in love many years ago in Gothic, Colorado. That ghost town serves as the home of the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory.
Today we visit one, Ivittuut that did not inspire much romance. It was a mining post for cryolite (sodium aluminum fluoride), a mineral used for aluminum production because of its fluorine content.
Far in the past, the area around the abandoned town was one of Greenland’s Norse farm settlements, and called the “Middle Settlement,” because it is between the Western and Easter Settlements. It was likely one of the first Norse areas to be vacated, but even so, was inhabited for about 350 years.
Cryolite was first discovered at the site around 1800, and the ore had silver bearing lead which turned out to be too expensive to refine. The cryolite would haven been processed directly for its aluminum in those days, and was also sold to the USA company Pennsylvania Salt Manufacturing for “caustic soda.”
Eventually it was discovered that cryolite helped extract aluminum from bauxite. The mining town was considered so strategically important that the US sent the army to guard it during WWII. Around the same time, a naval support base, Grondal, was established. The cryolite has largely been mined out and the mine stopped being acting in 1987. Denmark maintains a seismological station there.
Before the zodiacs could be loaded, expedition crew went ashore to search every building for wildlife, and “secure a perimeter.” I believe this is the first time in my life I have ever had a perimeter secured for me.
It was cool and rainy and we were in full gear, in fact, we didn’t even bother to take our life vests off while we walked around since getting back into them would have been more annoying than walking around with them on.
There are many abandoned buildings in “haunted house” disrepair. The spookier ones to me are those that had been used fairly recently and had some household items left behind.
The quarry was a big pit, on the shore, and now completely filled. The rock face shows how deep the mining activity went.
We saw trees that had, most likely, been brought with miners: a scotch pine, a larch, and near several building, rowan. Plants cure homesickness through the centuries.
The rainy walk was preceded by a morning lecture by Colorado College’s geology professor, Christine Siddoway.
Take always from Christine’s lecture:
*I’m a biologist and we think about short term time periods, even when emphasizing long term processes like evolution. Geologists look at rocks that are so much older, and read the story from land mass to land mass;
*The importance of ice coverings to maintaining the earth’s temperature is so incredibly multifaceted. The positive feedback loops that contribute to ice melting is also multifaceted. An example today: soot from air pollution deposits on the ice making it darker, and the ice absorbs heat instead of reflecting it, and so the ice melts faster.
*Ocean currents, ocean currents, ocean currents.! They drive temperature, nutrient flow, and greatly influence continental weather. We have to try not to change the patterns we are adapted for. When I think back to my years as a middle school science teacher, I wish I had dwelt more on ocean currents. It’s not standard in school curriculums and it ought to be.
And a fourth (because Christine is an Antarctic researcher and has accumulated 26 months in Antarctica over the course of her career so far): A wind storm in Antarctica can be so severe that there is no white out….because all the snow has blown away. Unfortunately, that snow helps to anchor shelters and equipment. Nerve wracking would be putting it mildly, while living in a tent under those conditions.
Our evening finished off with a trip to the deck to see the super blue moon. (Super hard to photograph and do it justice; I hope you got to see it, where ever you are.)
Windy and rough sea tonight.
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