Slush Puppies: Mesmerizing Photo Shows Sled Dogs ‘Walking on Water’
OutdoorHub Reporters 06.19.19
A photo of sled dogs wading through ankle-deep water on top of a melting ice sheet in Greenland is both captivating and startling the internet.
The photo was taken by Danish Meteorologist Steffen Olsen while trekking through northwest Greenland on a mission to recover tools used by scientists to track ocean and weather changes. However, due to reasons you will notice right away, he never did find them.
See, the Inglefield Gulf on which Olsen was traveling on is usually covered in a layer of ice and snow, but instead was flooded with running water from Greenland’s melting ice sheet.
“@SteffenMalskaer got the difficult task of retrieving our oceanographic moorings and weather station on sea ice in North West Greenland this year,” Olsen’s colleague Rasmus Tonboe wrote on Twitter. “Rapid melt and sea ice with low permeability and few cracks leaves the melt water on top.”
@SteffenMalskaer got the difficult task of retrieving our oceanographic moorings and weather station on sea ice in North West Greenland this year. Rapid melt and sea ice with low permeability and few cracks leaves the melt water on top. pic.twitter.com/ytlBDTrVeD
— Rasmus Tonboe (@RasmusTonboe) June 14, 2019
Olsen’s photo was timely for two reasons. The first being the obvious fact that his dogs appear to be walking on water, the second is much more sobering.
Around the same time Olsen snapped the mesmerizing photo, news broke about Greenland suffering a massive loss of ice a lot sooner than anticipated this season:
Yesterday (13th June), we calculate #Greenland #icesheet lost more than 2 Gt (2 km³) of ice,, melt was widespread but didn’t quite get to #SummitCamp which was just below 0°C
The high melt is unusual so early in the season but not unprecedentedhttps://t.co/Ftg0fkC7AK pic.twitter.com/Y4jQ1FoFRZ
— Greenland (@greenlandicesmb) June 14, 2019
Olsen then took to Twitter personally calling for immediate action:
Communities in #Greenland rely on the sea ice for transport, hunting and fishing. Extreme events, here flooding of the ice by abrupt onset of surface melt call for an incresed predictive capacity in the Arctic @BG10Blueaction @polarprediction @dmidk https://t.co/Y1EWU1eurA
— Steffen M. Olsen (@SteffenMalskaer) June 14, 2019
