The most memorable moment Will Gadd experienced under the Greenland ice cap while exploring inside a moulin – a vertical tube bored into glacial ice by the force of running meltwater – happened when he realized he’d just rappelled into a “giant exploding tube of ice.”
Retreating quickly, he and his expedition partners sized up what they had just learned. As they explored deep inside the moulin and investigated some horizontal passages that had been bored by running meltwater during the warm summer season, the already cool winter temperatures dropped to -30 C. With some of the ice inside the glacier frozen solid and some in a slush stage, Gadd understood the hazard.
“When ice is at different temperatures on the surface and internally it’s always really unstable,” he said. “We rapidly learned that, just as in ice climbing, temperature differentials matter to ice stability.”
That reminder, however, was just one of many lessons of the adventure, and of the science of how water moves on and inside ice that is thousands of years old Gadd and his expedition mates learned on this trip.
The Canmore-based professional adventurer was in Greenland in October with glaciologist Jason Gulley, University of Southern Florida professor studying how meltwater effects the movement of the Greenland ice cap.
A leading expert on glacial hydrology, Gully is also a first-rate cave diver. Prior to rappelling right into glacial moulins, most research on how water moves inside and under glaciers had been done by sending coloured dye into meltwater streams to see where the water emerges, and through computer modelling.
Gadd’s own curiosity about how water moves under glaciers has been growing through his decades as an ice climber and a mountain adventurer with numerous firsts to his credit.
“I’ve spent a lot of time looking at that water falling into moulins and wondered what it was like down there,” he said.
Two winters ago, he partnered with University of Alberta glaciologist Martin Sharp to explore deep inside a moulin on the Rockies’ Athabasca Glacier. While initially seeking answers to how water moves inside and underneath glaciers, they found much more.
“In the Athabasca Glacier it was just to see what was down there, but then it turned into a research project when we very unexpectedly found biofilms down there,” Gadd said.
“This was really exciting to the scientific world, and also to me – just the idea of microbes living in ice seemed so crazy. But there are a lot of them, and the University of Alberta had some DNA sequencing done, which led to more calls for research, which was really exciting to me.
“Glaciers are actually full of life and caves despite looking sterile and solid.”
Gadd’s work on the Athabasca, where he used his decades of ice climbing skills and safety knowledge as a certified guide to assist the scientists working in the challenging and dangerous environment inside glaciers, led to him teaming up with Gulley.
Through his project in Greenland, Gulley has pioneered rappelling into crevasses to set up instruments to monitor meltwater, and to map glacier caves and flow paths. In need of some technical assistance, he connected with Gadd.
Their plan in Greenland was to not only rappel down into a moulin, but, once they reached the water table, to dive under it to explore the caves and channels. To work in this environment, Gadd had to learn highly-specialized cave-diving skills.
Among a raft of challenges were the logistics of transporting themselves and all their gear to the Greenland ice cap in winter and maintaining their camp and research site in extreme weather conditions.
“On the ice cap it’s really, really windy and cold, so just functioning and trying to complete our scientific exploration goals was a challenge,” Gadd said, adding other hazards included “falling ice, unpredictable water levels, the motion of the glacier and its impact on the caves, plus the usual dangers of climbing in a very remote location.”
Since this type of research is new, the expedition yielded many surprises, as the moulins turned out to be a lot different from what the computer models had predicted.
“There’s just no information, so it’s true exploration in a way that’s very rare in today’s Google Maps era,” Gadd said.
“We didn’t know where we were going, or what was there, or how to move around. To me that’s a perfect expedition. It is stressful and complicated and interesting and all the things I really like, just a really great challenge.”
With that, he added he was eager to return and try again when the ice and the air temperature had more time to equalize, so they might more safely access the water table.
“When working in high-hazard environments, it’s important to stay humble about how small you are, and how complicated the environment is,” Gadd said.
“Running away was the smart action, but we can go back with more knowledge and better preparation. You only fail when you don’t learn from the experience.”
Gadd said he was grateful his sponsor, Red Bull chose to support the expedition, in addition to Gulley’s scientific funding.
“There are a lot of projects that companies can put money into, and I’m appreciative that Red Bull saw the value in helping scientific research. At their rawest science and exploration are the same thing: What’s out there, how does it work?”
Those questions, though, are a big part of what motivated him in the first place to attempt a project that has not been done before. This expedition, he admitted, pushed him to his limits.
“No project I’ve ever done pushed me as hard as Greenland, it was really, really technical and complicated, and that’s without the cold and remote location,” Gadd said. “To me that’s why it was really rewarding to combine my athletic and guiding skills with scientific research and make even a little difference to how we understand this planet. For me that’s very satisfying. I love climbing and trying new things, but when those exploits result in real scientific knowledge it feels more worthwhile.”
