A set of Inuit Tupilaq hand carved from walrus ivory

 In Greenlandic Inuit traditions a tupilaq was an avenging monster created by witches or warlocks and given life through a series of ritualistic chants.   It was then placed into the sea to seek and destroy a specific enemy. The use of a tupilaq was risky, however, because if it was sent to destroy someone who had greater magical powers than the one who had formed it, it could be sent back to kill its maker instead.

Happy 119th birthday to the “Snow Baby”!

In September of 1893, Josephine Peary gave birth to her first child while on an expedition in Greenland with her husband, Robert Peary. They named their daughter Marie Ahnighito Peary, her middle name after an Inuit woman in the community. It had been shocking enough to American society that Josephine, raised in an upper-class DC family, had accompanied her husband to the Arctic at all. A white child’s birth at the northern edge of the known world captured the popular imagination, and she became known as the “Snow Baby.”

Marie spent a good chunk of her childhood in the Arctic - she accompanied her mother on two major expeditions northward to track down her father, and was frozen in Payer Harbor off Ellesmere Island for ten months when she was seven. Josephine (and later Marie herself) recorded Marie’s early life in the Arctic in several popular books of the time. The Snow Baby again captured international attention when she was 16, as her father reached the North Pole in 1909, and the Peary family became celebrated worldwide.

In 1932, Marie (now married to Edward Stafford) returned to the Arctic to erect a monument in her father’s honor and to revisit the sites of her childhood. She continued to advise, write about, and research Arctic matters and her father’s expeditions for the rest of her life, and was awarded several honors. Marie died in 1978.

(Newspaper headline from the Dallas Morning News, 10-18-1903, page 42, courtesy of the Dallas Morning News Historical Archive, accessed with NewsBank/Readex America’s Historical Newspapers archives.)

Greenland's viking settlers gorged on seals

UNSOLVED MYSTERY Greenland’s viking settlers, the Norse, disappeared suddenly and mysteriously from Greenland about 500 years ago. Natural disasters, climate change and the inability to adapt have all been proposed as theories to explain their disappearance. But now a Danish-Canadian research team has demonstrated the Norse society did not die out due to an inability to adapt to the Greenlandic diet: an isotopic analysis of their bones shows they ate plenty of seals.

“Our analysis shows that the Norse in Greenland ate lots of food from the sea, especially seals,” says Jan Heinemeier, Institute of Physics and Astronomy, Aarhus University.

“Even though the Norse are traditionally thought of as farmers, they adapted quickly to the Arctic environment and the unique hunting opportunities. Read more.

Icelandic Archeologist to Lead Excavation in Greenland

Icelandic archeologist Orri Vésteinsson will lead an excavation project in Garðar of the Eastern Settlement in Igaliku fjord in south Greenland in July and August this summer, where the remains of a church and other buildings from the Middle Ages are located. Garðar served as bishopric for the Nordic settlement in Greenland.

Three other archeologists from the Icelandic Institute of Archeology and seven archeologists from the US and Greenland will also take part in the project, Morgunblaðið reports.

In 2005, well-preserved animal bones and objects that are believed to date back to the Nordic settlement were discovered when wetlands near the remains were drained. This summer’s excavation will be focused on this area. Read more.

A detail from the map of Disko Bay we posted last week.

And check out the modern Google Maps satellite version! I think the juxtaposition here is really awesome.

Discovery of Historical Photos Sheds Light On Greenland Ice Loss

A chance discovery of 80-year-old photo plates in a Danish basement is providing new insight into how Greenland glaciers are melting today.

Researchers at the National Survey and Cadastre of Denmark — that country’s federal agency responsible for surveys and mapping — had been storing the glass plates since explorer Knud Rasmussen’s expedition to the southeast coast of Greenland in the early 1930s.

In this week’s online edition of Nature Geoscience, Ohio State University researchers and colleagues in Denmark describe how they analyzed ice loss in the region by comparing the images on the plates to aerial photographs and satellite images taken from World War II to today.

Taken together, the imagery shows that glaciers in the region were melting even faster in the 1930s than they are today, said Jason Box, associate professor of geography and researcher at the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State. Read more.

After landing in Greenland in 1913, MacMillan and his team built their home base at Etah, a common base camp site for Arctic expeditions. They planned to stay here for two years, venturing out onto the ocean in early spring to try and locate Crocker Land before the ice broke up with warm weather, and collecting scientific data at the lodge (which they named Borup Lodge, in honor of George Borup) during the rest of the time.

Borup Lodge became their home until 1917, when the team was finally rescued after being stranded for two extra years.