After months of planning, sprinkled with hope and despair in equal amounts, we have finally made an unsurprising, but still very difficult, decision: we are cancelling our summer field work this year. This means our microbial macroecology project (GrISMEME) is being delayed once again (after a helicopter shortage last summer), and the transect sampling on the Greenland ice sheet is postponed till 2021, the last year of the project. But that’s life, and all project dependent on field work face the same problem. This also means GrISMEME will directly compete for resources (field personnel, helicopter time) with our new subglacial methane project (MARCH4G). It seems that, corona-permitting, 2021 will be the mother of all field seasons for us. Please wish us luck!

As a consolation, below is a field (office) picture of a real (Lego) helicopter on the surface of the ice sheet (office floor).