First Day At Basecamp, 1 July

I'm sitting on a rock, batting away mosquitoes and looking down on a vast fortress of ice as it slowly crumbles into the fjord. This is the first full day at our Store glacier base camp, home for the next two weeks.

Basecamp at the glacier

I’m sitting on a rock, batting away mosquitoes and looking down on a vast fortress of ice as it slowly crumbles into the fjord. This is the first full day at our Store glacier base camp, home for the next two weeks.

Ice is king in this landscape. Everything else is just playing a supporting role. We are camping on a large flat ledge overlooking the front of the glacier, and the kitchen tent (where the party is, of course) has a fabulous view. Several times an hour there are large booms as ice falls off the front, and everyone looks up to try and catch the drama. It’s a frustrating game though, because it takes a second or so for the sound to reach us and so we often miss the falling ice.

The trip to the glacier from Ilulissat was spectacular. It took us ten hours to get around the coast by boat, weaving our way through relatively small lumps of ice known as bergy bits, and we even saw some fin whales along the way. It was like a trip through a sculpture gallery. Not only has the water carved the ice into stunning shapes, but the ice itself has layers and stripes hinting at the complexity of its formation. It was a tantalizing preview of the science we’ll be focusing on while we’re here.

Yesterday was a long day. I’m pretty sure that most of us were awake for 20 hours, but the weird thing about 24 hour daylight is that you don’t really notice. I crawled into my tent at 1:30am, and it felt like 3pm in the afternoon. Dozing at 5am, I could hear birds singing outside, and the booming glacier made me imagine that someone was shooting at them with cannons. I was up at 7:30am, it’s now 11pm and I don’t feel tired at all. I’m sure that this can’t last!

Our time here will be logistically complicated – we have to co-ordinate two filming teams working up on the glacier, here in camp and down on the water in front of the glacier. Already we’re worried because the weather tomorrow may not be good enough for the helicopter to fly and that would really limit what we can do. It’s been raining with a lot of low cloud, which is apparently unusual at this time of year. We’ll find out in the morning (although it won’t feel like morning – the sky will probably look exactly as it does now). We also really want to catch a large iceberg calving on camera, but there’s no way of knowing which part of the glacier front will go next or how much will fall off. So many unknowns...