Summer vacation trip gave NFA teacher chills
She traveled to Greeland to study polar ice cap and will bring experience back to the classroom
Norwich — When school starts again Aug. 30 for ninth-graders at Norwich Free Academy, ninth-grade integrated science teacher Megan Frayne is likely to have the best “How I spent my summer vacation” story.
“It felt like I was in a science fiction movie,” Frayne said last week. “It felt like I was on another planet actually.”
Frayne never left Earth, but she did step on territory where few men (or women) had gone before.
Mostly funded through a grant from the Houston-based Fund for Teachers, Frayne joined a group of scientists based in Copenhagen, Denmark, to the polar ice cap in remote northern Greenland. She arrived at EastGRIP — East Greenland Ice-Core Project, an international scientific research project managed by the Centre for Ice and Climate at the University of Copenhagen — on the summer solstice, June 21, and experienced firsthand the meaning of the phrase “Land of the Midnight Sun.”
Frayne and about 20 scientists and support staff, including a topnotch chef to feed the climate change researchers, traveled to the International Science Support Station in Greenland and boarded a barely heated U.S. military plane for a three-hour flight north to EGRIP Camp, where scientists operate
an underground laboratory equipped with a giant drill to collect samples of the ancient polar ice core. Data was collected on ice core physical properties, ice stream flows and isotopes.
She worked with Sune Rasmussen, Centre for Ice and Climate coordinator and an associate professor at the University of Copenhagen. Rasmussen welcomed Frayne’s participation as part of his effort to make sure students and the general public in the United States have the right information about climate change, Frayne said.
The plane landed on the polar ice sheet 12,000 feet in altitude. Frayne stepped off the plane and stopped dead in her tracks, holding up traffic for those behind her.
“I don’t think anything actually can prepare you for actually walking out onto that plain,” she said. “All you see is sky and ice, 360 degrees. At midnight, the sun is very, very bright. That sun looks like you could reach out and grab it.”
Having diverted from studying neuroscience at the University of Connecticut to a career as a high school science teacher, Frayne felt she lacked the personal experiences to bring real Earth problems to her students to get them excited about learning. New science teaching methods emphasize the need to engage students in real scientific research.
Frayne learned last year that the nonprofit Fund for Teachers provides grants of up to $5,000 for teachers to design research projects in their chosen field. She was approved for her plan to study the Arctic polar ice cap.
In April, she contacted two labs at the forefront in Arctic climate change research, a field she wanted to bring home to students. A week later, the Centre for Ice and Climate in Copenhagen responded and agreed to allow Frayne to shadow its scientists at the ice core drill. Her parents, John and Marjorie Frayne of Mystic, set up a GoFundMe page to raise the remaining $1,500 she needed.
Contacted via email, Rasmussen said he eagerly embraced Frayne’s proposal to join the group on a research trip. The centre often does outreach, and inviting a high school teacher allows the group to reach students, he said.
“We reach a different audience by working with a science teacher like Megan who knows how to get the message across to the students and who can develop a context where our climate science input becomes accessible and tangible,” Rasmussen wrote. “And Megan’s enthusiasm was contagious. She really wanted to do this project and her own background in science fostered some good ideas about how to combine our climate science knowledge with her research and teaching experience.”
Armed with a GoPro camera and iPhone — “batteries are challenging in the Arctic freeze,” she said — a large backpack of clothes and a bright red NFA flag, Frayne set off on her three-week adventure.
She camped above ground at EGRIP Camp, sharing a heated tent on the polar ice sheet with five others. She descended the long, sloping tunnel 80 feet underground into “the Underhills at EGRIP,” the actual drill site. The main drill, about 10 inches in diameter, she said, was taking samples at 500 to 600 meters down, contacting flowing ice streams along the way. Core samples about 2 feet long are extracted and placed in different boxes for different studies, she said.
Frayne stayed busy working with the scientists as they worked their meticulously timed 12-hour shifts. With the sun encircling the camp in the sky 24 hours a day, scientists must keep to their schedules, with set times for lunch, breaks and time in the “warm boxes,” which resemble freezers, Frayne said. They are not allowed to bring their work to the dinner table.
She walked out onto the ice outside EGRIP to pose holding her NFA flag when a companion told her she probably was the first person ever to walk on that spot. She left behind a trail of footprints through a few inches of freshly fallen snow.
Frayne hopes to obtain data from the various studies and bring it to her NFA students for analysis. She will ask her students to help trace the melting ice that crashes into the Disko Bay on the west coast of Greenland into the North Atlantic and eventually to the shores of southeastern Connecticut.
NFA already has a strong working relationship with Project Oceanology, a nonprofit marine science educational program based at UConn’s Avery Point campus in Groton. Frayne hopes to enlist Project O in her students’ lessons on climate change and sea level rise.
“One of the biggest things I want to do is take their high-level science and make it so everyone can understand it,” Frayne said of the ice cap research.
This summer has been especially snowy at the ice sheet, Frayne said, which is good for maintaining the ice sheet and slowing the progress of ice melt that fuels sea level rise around the world. But still, Greenland is at “Ground Zero” of climate change and sea level rise.
After leaving EGRIP, she traveled to a surface study site, where scientists dug a deep trench to study layers of ice that resemble tree rings. A 2-inch thick “scar” in the wall of the trench indicated the 2012 major ice melt incident that caused catastrophic flooding downstream, Frayne said. She stood in the trench of ice formed in 2007.
Frayne learned some new vocabulary words to go with her experiences.
As they hiked the five-story tall glacier, they heard the constant roar of “white thunder,” the echoing sound of cracking glacier ice. The rushing water of ice melt quickens as the glacier is about to “calve,” a term used to describe large chunks of ice that drop into the water. They had to scramble to higher ground.
From there, Frayne traveled to the town of Ilulissat, a World Heritage Site and location of the 10-story tall Eqi Glacier, one of the fastest-moving glaciers on Earth. The giant iceberg calves dot Disko Bay. Frayne held up her camera as the white thunder roared and captured a small calving event from 3 miles away.
“There are villages in Greenland that are hearing this every day,” Frayne said. “They are living at Ground Zero of climate change.”
Throughout her trip, Frayne kept in contact with the NFA communications and marketing department. Geoff Serra, NFA director of communications, and Nick Bolt helped load her photos and videos for her “Currents of Climate Change” blog on the www.nfaschool.org website and post items to Instagram and Twitter. In one photo, Frayne posed with an ice core sample.
“I’m staring out across the ice sheet again,” she wrote in one entry. “It’s become an obsession. It just never ends. If I squint I swear the white of the sheet and the white of the clouds just merge into one infinite entity. I ponder the same deep, existential thoughts I’ve been wrestling with for a day or so now.”
Scientists at the Copenhagen Centre for Ice and Climate are not all “doom and gloom” about climate change, Frayne said. They believe humans have time in the coming decades to reverse the trend.
“These kids,” she said of her ninth-grade students, “are going to be the ones who can make the difference.”
Rasmussen said there are many “real facts” about climate change that cannot seriously be disputed, such as carbon dioxide being a greenhouse gas that can be measured accurately.
“This does not mean that we understand everything about the climate system,” Rasmussen wrote, “and there are many aspects of climate and climate change where we have a pretty good understanding of how the climate system works (backed up by observations, computer models, and physics) without knowing all the details as definitive facts. Our understanding may change if a new theory fits the observations better of if new data arrive that falsify the previous theory, but it takes a lot of new convincing data to change a well-backed-up theory.”