Water Sample

For millions of years Ice, Rivers and Oceans have been shaping the Arctic Terrain of Greenland. But with climate change the flow of ice and water is drastically increasing. So much so that the sea around Greenland is said to be undergoing “freshening” - that is, that the normally salty sea water is receiving such increasing amounts of freshwater from melting and calving glaciers, and from rivers and streams that collect rain and snowfall, that it is changing the salinity of the sea around Greenland. But it is not only the salinity of this freshwater running off of Greenland, that we scientists are interested in. We are also interested in what this freshwater may contain. A sample of glacier ice water is actually quite pure. It has much fewer impurities than drinking water, and it is even sometimes more pure than the purest water we use to calibrate our instruments in the lab. But once the ice melts and runs along the diverse Greenland landscape it picks up all kinds of things, some of which might be useful to life in the ocean. For example, Greenland river run-off has high levels of iron and silica, which are important nutrients used by tiny photosynthetic plants in the ocean. Our scientific questions revolve around these aspects, how will the increasing freshwater and elements it contains affect life in Greenland fjords in the future?  Therefore, we take small samples of ice, river and ocean water back to the lab to analyze the chemical composition. Some of the elements in Greenland glacier water that are now flowing freely into the ocean have been sitting, stored frozen for millenia. We here present water collected by scientists in remote parts of Greenland. The water has been used for experiments and analysed in the laboratory for chemical and biological parameters.  The excess water has been sealed in glass bottles in perpetuity to become part of this exhibition and for you to hold.