Arctic beauty at the Victoria Fjord during the GEOEO expedition
August 20, 2024, Johan Nilsson. For the last few days, Oden has been operating just outside the Victoria Fjord. The setting is beautiful and dramatic.
2024-08-20; 82°N, 50°W
At the fjord entrance Stephenson Island towers, nearly 1000m high with steep walls. The icy waters are laden with a myriad of large icebergs. These icebergs stem from the Ostenfeld Glacier’s ice tongue that disintegrated some 20 years ago, and spawned tabular icebergs that can be over 200 m thick and several kilometers long. The uncharted waters and the icebergs make Oden’s way into the fjord a slow and potentially hazardous enterprise.
The science and data collection is in full operation. We have begun to see indications that warmer water of Atlantic origin flow into the fjord, and melt the Ostenfeld glacier several hundreds of meters below the sea surface. One mission of the expedition is to examine if inflow of warmer Atlantic waters may have contributed to the break up of Ostenfeld’s floating ice tongue around 2002.
Last updated: August 29, 2024
Source: MISU