Uncategorized

Dartmouth engineers prepare for project in Greenland

By David Corriveau
Valley News
HANOVER, N.H. — Ask Mary Albert about the $2.6 million renewable energy project she’s preparing to lead in northwest Greenland over the next four years, and the Dartmouth engineering professor will tell you she’s not really the boss.

Rather, she’s following the lead of the indigenous Greenlanders who told her years ago they could not afford, for much longer, the diesel fuel and the carbon-dependent technologies they use for travel and home heating and lighting — even if climate change weren’t melting the 660,000-square-mile ice sheet blanketing most of their high-Arctic territory of Denmark.

“It was their idea,” Albert, who teaches at Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering, said last week. “They invited me. This is not me trying to impose foreign research on their lifestyle. This is called stakeholder-driven science. It’s driven by their values and their needs, and their desires for the future.”

Albert said the team will travel to the town of Qaanaaq, one of the northernmost communities in Greenland, twice a year between April 2020 and the end of 2023. During those trips they’ll explore with the natives how to make their traditional lifestyle more sustainable through education, innovative technology and changes in government policy.

Currently, for instance, the residents of Qaanaaq use snowmobiles powered by fossil fuels, but the research will seek alternative power sources.

“I’ve been thinking about a way to do this for years, since a Greenlander came up to me after a talk I was giving about my ice-drilling research and said, ‘We cannot afford the diesel fuel we now use in everyday life,’” Albert recalled. “I told them I’d work to pull together a team that could figure it out and work with them. This model we’ve come up with is designed to pull all those things in the right direction.”

Albert figures that that approach clinched the grant she applied for a year ago, from the National Science Foundation’s Navigating the New Arctic program.

“It’s tough to find funding for a project like this, when you’ve got to hire grad students, arrange for transportation and so forth,” she said. “When I learned about Navigating the New Arctic, I said, ‘Omigosh! This is exactly what we need.’ And I was fortunate to have two Greenlanders as partners, so that the proposal fit their vision as well as our overall team plan.”

One of those Greenlanders is Lene Kielsen Holm, a scientist with the territory’s Institute of Natural Resources who spoke at a conference several years ago where Albert also spoke.

“In order to have a healthy community, we need to address the economic issues that accompany our energy needs and help promote a more sustainable society,” Kielsen Holm said in a Thayer School news release announcing the grant. “Economic change would produce many beneficial side effects such as enabling more independence and bringing people back to a more balanced everyday life.”

That balance includes freeing more of the natives to return to their cultural roots in hunting and fishing, Albert said, a case that indigenous hunter-fisher Toku Oshima is making to her friends, neighbors and colleagues.

“Toku is very well-known in Qaanaaq,” Albert said. “Everybody in town looks up to her. She feels really responsible for them.”

In addition to Albert, Kielsen Holm and Oshima, the leadership team for the project includes Stephen Doig, director of research at Dartmouth’s Irving Institute for Energy and Society; Thayer-School adjunct professor Christopher Polashenski and assistant professor Weiyang (Fiona) Li; and three students pursuing doctorates at Thayer and a postdoctoral fellow.

“This is an amazing opportunity to link science and human needs directly,” Polashenski said in the Thayer announcement. “Only by understanding the complex linkages between environmental change and human activities can we plan for the future.”

Avatar photo

As your daily newspaper, we are committed to providing you with important local news coverage for Sullivan County and the surrounding areas.