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No Place to Turn

The Johanna Kristina, a ferry and cargo ship that services villages in southeastern Greenland, struggled through an unusually heavy concentration of sea ice in the Sermilik Fjord in 2015. The same conditions also prevented a research team, led by WHOI physical oceanographer Fiamma Straneo, from retrieving a set of moorings placed in the fjord in 2013. They will try again in August to recover the instruments, which contain a record of how warm ocean water is encroaching into the fjord to melt the glacier from below while rising air temperatures melt it from above.(Photo by Rebecca Jackson, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)