Traveling from New Zealand to Greenland was arduous. As the airports shrank and planes were swapped for helicopters, I realized I was about to experience something well worth two days of travel. I jumped down from that helicopter into a world of mountains, sled dogs and houses colored like shipping containers. I felt like I had become Walter Mitty sans business tie and stubbly chin.

Over the summer I was given the unique opportunity by the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute to work with David and Denise Holland from NYUAD’s Center for Global Sea Level Change in Tasiilaq, Greenland. We researched glacier calving, the process by which sections at the front of a glacier break away into the ocean. David and Denise Holland hope to more accurately predict calving’s effect on sea level rise and are working on their model for this process.

Tasiilaq is the biggest settlement on Greenland’s east coast, hosting a total of 2,000 people. It has one hotel, one internet provider, a well-used football pitch and hiking trails that make you feel like you are walking through a scene in The Sound of Music. With its beauty came a certain sadness — I witnessed trash caught in the Tasiilaq streams, wrecked cars abandoned outside the hotel and some locals asleep on the tarmac next to an empty six pack. Yet the town was jovial, especially when it came to the evening football matches against teams from nearby settlements. Although we were on land for only a matter of days, Tasiilaq left me feeling bewildered and strangely refreshed.

Indeed, bewilderment was to become a theme for this research assistantship when I found myself on board a boat with a crew of Greenlanders, a professor, Ph.D. students, an artist and a man who goes meteor hunting in Antarctica. It was hard not to get to know the bunch when we were stuck on a boat together for a week. We bonded over a shared love of cats, a distaste for seasickness and picking out which icebergs we thought would be governmental buildings in a seal kingdom.

When we made our way into the ocean, over glassy water and through hulking icebergs, it was like sailing on the sky. We spent our days on the boat retrieving moorings from past expeditions, dismantling and rebuilding them and deploying new ones equipped with CTDs, also known as sondes, which are used for determining salinity, temperature, and depth, tsunameters to detect tsunami waves caused by a calving event and ADCP’s that use the doppler effect to determine current velocity. Retrieving moorings proved to be a more difficult task than putting them into the ocean, as football-field-sized icebergs trap them below the surface. Consequently, our self-appointed titles became Mooring Deployment Experts, and Occasional Mooring Retrievers. I intend to get business cards made.

Here are some of my photographs from this incredible experience, polar bear-adorned helicopter helmet and sled dogs included.