News

STRATTON AIR NATIONAL GUARD BASE, N.Y. - The New York Air National Guard’s 109th Airlift Wing wrapped up its 2024 support for National Science Foundation research in Greenland at the end of August.

Throughout the season, which began in April, the 109th Airlift Wing’s Airmen conducted essential airlift missions to support scientific research on the Greenland ice cap.

The 109th Airlift Wing flies the LC-130. These are the largest aircraft in the world equipped with skis so they can land on snow and ice. These are also the only ski-equipped aircraft flown by the U.S. military.

The unit’s primary responsibilities included transporting personnel, equipment and supplies to remote locations.

These included Summit Station, a research station near the apex of the Greenland ice sheet, and East Grip, a science camp that drills and retrieves ice cores from the Northeast Greenland Ice Stream.

Supplies to rebuild Summit Station, manned year-round for critical weather information and climate research, were carried to the station by 109th aircraft.

The ice sheets near the Earth’s poles contain ancient ice formed from continuous snow accumulation over thousands of years. Using ice cores, scientists can study the old air trapped in the ice, which unlocks mysteries of Earth’s environmental history. 

On June 27 at 1 pm EST, join researchers from the University of California Irvine live from NSF Summit Station, Greenland as they study historical changes in atmospheric levels of hydrogen using a newly drilled ice core from the Greenland ice cap. Because of the unique challenges posed by hydrogen’s small molecular size, the researchers are bringing their instruments to Greenland to analyze samples as soon as they are retrieved! 

Register today at https://bit.ly/summit_website.

STRATTON AIR NATIONAL GUARD BASE, N.Y. - Four LC-130 “Skibirds” and about 75 Airmen from the New York Air National Guard’s 109th Airlift Wing began the annual Greenland season supporting the National Science Foundation. 

The 109th flies the largest ski-equipped aircraft in the world, capable of landing on snow and ice. The wing conducts resupply missions for American scientific research in Antarctica when it is winter in New York and in Greenland during the summer months. 

In 2023, the wing’s Airmen carried 2.4 million pounds of cargo and 86,000 gallons of fuel and delivered 1,300 passengers to science stations in Greenland. They flew a total of 721 hours. 

The aircraft and Airmen are currently in the second of six rotations of 75 to 100 Airmen and four aircraft scheduled throughout the summer support season. 

The Airmen fly from Stratton Air National Guard Base in Scotia, near Schenectady, New York, to Kangerlussuaq International Airport in Greenland, which serves as their operating base.

At the apex of the Greenland ice sheet, a community of 41 scientists and support staff carry out cutting-edge research into everything from climate change to particle physics

For two hours, I had been sitting amid heavy cargo inside the hot, cavernous fuselage of a ski-equipped New York National Air Guard Hercules C-130. Other than the pilots, the aircraft carried just me, two loadmasters and Mike Jayred, a highly reputed ice-coring engineer who has spent the past two decades extracting some of the oldest and most precious climate records ever retrieved from Greenland and Antarctica. Any attempts at conversation were drowned out by the pressurisation, the roar of the propellor engines and our fluorescent earplugs.

Dear colleagues,

We are pleased to invite you to participate in a collaborative workshop targeted at identifying the Future of Greenland Ice Sheet Science. Although this workshop is organized at the behest of U.S.-based funding agencies, we invite the perspectives and participation of our international colleagues as well.

The Future of Greenland Ice Sheet Science (FOGSS) workshop descends from the successful legacies of the previous NASA PARCA and NSF GEOSummit workshop. The FOGSS workshop will consist of collaborative priority-setting discussions as well as brief presentations focused on increasing the impact of existing and proposed research activities in Greenland.

We have launched a website containing further information regarding the structure and orientation of this workshop, which is scheduled over Zoom for three hrs per day, April 6-8.

https://www.fogss-workshop.org/