Jeff Kerby

09/05/2024

My photo essay on the hunt for the northernmost flower with Brian Buma, Aka Simonsen, and Alejandra Borunda is now out on National Geographic! Northern Greenland threw up some tough obstacles, but it's exciting to share the first glimpses of this broader project. Supported by the National Geographic Society

Scientists journeyed to a stretch of gravel off the coast of Greenland—the farthest north you can go and still walk on land. These photos show what they found there.

13/02/2024

Swirls of ice, sea-, and freshwater commingle in a little visited fjord in northeast Greenland. Amidst these beautiful patterns are clues to a bigger story about changing climate and the world’s oceans. Scientists like and colleagues at are busy at work to fit these pieces all together, giving us insights into a future that is arriving fast.

This image is from the Northeast Greenland National Park, a nearly one million square kilometer of wilderness encompassing fjords, tundra and a huge stretch of the inland ice sheet. The nearest town is Ittoqqortoormiit, just south of the park.

27/09/2023

Rhoss Fjord, Northeast Greenland. | Going through imagery from recent summers and realizing I’ve never shared most of it. Here’s a start - one of my favorite places and one that is very rarely visited , the terminus of Rhoss Fjord. I could stare at this landscape for days!

20/09/2023

Ymer Island in Northeast, Greenland. An unreal landscape, made even more so when you find a very, very old whale bone sticking out of the tundra 4km away from the coast (last photo)… More questions than answers!

23/06/2023

My first trip to West Greenland was in 2009, the beginning of my involvement in a long-running study of caribou, muskoxen, and the tundra environment they live in and shape.

Today, we published a research paper in lead by Eric Post that links large herbivore diversity at this site to slower declines in plant diversity that are happening as the site has warmed over the past 15 years. The loss of sea ice influences the way weather patterns interact with the Greenland Ice sheet, changing predominant wind direction off of vs towards the inland ice, thereby changing temperatures on the tundra near its margins.

It takes well over a decade of careful observations and experimental treatments to begin to understand this complexity, and its understandably a huge team effort, both among researchers but also supported by our many other colleagues and friends living Kangerlussuaq or abroad. I’ll add a link to the study in my profile.

02/10/2022

It can take a few hours to reach Rohss Fjord from Ella Ø in these Mopa Expedition boats. On days like this when the water is glass it feels more like flying. As we approach the end of the fjord, scientists from the GIOS project send down their CTD sensors to learn where the different layers of water of the fjord originated - The ocean? The melting ice sheet? .all.life

27/09/2022

Low Arctic sun paints Bastionen on Ella Ø in Northeast Greenland. August 2022 with Aarhus University’s Arctic Research Center, NANOK, and the GIOS team.

08/09/2022

Two muskoxen and one musk rock…the lack of trees in NE Greenland allows for unhindered landscape views and excellent opportunities to spot wildlife. Searching for animals inevitably goes to the limits of the human eye and so begins the one of my favorite games: ‘That small dot you see a few kilometers away…is it a muskox? Or just musk rocks?’ .all.life

04/09/2022

Setting anchor to begin a walk back in time with Prof. Torben Christensen and Peter Schmidt Mikkelsen, author, former Sirius Patrol, and director of Nordøstgrønlandsk Kompagni Nanok. We will take some time to tell this story, but with only a few days in this special place we could glimpse into a Greenlandic environment that no longer exists.

01/09/2022

We encountered polar bears in almost every region we visited this summer in NE Greenland. This was a pleasant encounter as we slowly drift past in our boat, whereas other times we had to drop what we were doing and leave our work unfinished while we found safety. This is unlike last summer when one broke into our cabin while we were sleeping! Part of this trip involved revisiting expedition notes written a century ago. They spent much more time in these fjords than we did, yet made an interesting observation: bears were rarely seen inland and away from the coast? Does this mean there are more polar bears now? Probably not…the sea ice that they prefer to spend their time on no longer exists, or disappears earlier in the year. It makes working on land a bit more challenging at times! With the Aarhus University Arctic Research Center team and the ex-Sirius patrol team ‘Nanok’. 🇬🇱

30/08/2022

A just published study in Nature Climate Change reports we’re already committed to a 27 cm rise in sea level due to Greenland Ice Sheet melting, regardless of what mitigation strategies we enact. Continued policy changes can help make this an upper limit, rather than just the start. This past month I joined a separate research team from Aarhus University and the VLIZ marine robotics center that seeks to unravel the mystery of where meltwater that disappears down into the vast moulins (ie holes) in Greenland ice sheet emerges. As melt contributes to sea level rise, it also changes the very characteristics of sea water. To understand the implications of these changes, we first need to know the basics - like when, where, and how much these inputs are entering the system. Part of a bigger monitoring and research effort in NE Greenland. 🇬🇱

30/08/2022

As Rohss Fjord ends, a snaking valley delta begins. Oh to have the time to venture inland… The sediments from the glacial melt turn the water a chilled turquoise. There is a strange pinch point partway down the fjord where another delta presses inwards from the south, causing whirlpools when the tides are right. NE Greenland with the Arctic Research Center at AU. 🇬🇱

29/08/2022

A 2 hour job turns to a 14 hour odyssey as distance, polar bear encounters, and problem solving push the long Arctic day to its limit. Racing home through Vega Sund, long orange rays beam from the north through mountain peaks. It is too loud to talk as the boats jump through the waves, but we smile at one another as mountain tops grow warm and glow. Northeast Greenland.

29/08/2022

Can you spot us? The walk up towards Bastionen on Ella Ø was a tiring but mind-blowing welcome back to NE Greenland. It’s wild that a 4000ft sheer cliff face ranks on the smaller side of things in this region. From here you could easily see a hundred km east and west. These sights give a good overview of where we’d be heading in the coming weeks with the GIOS project and the Arctic Research Center at Aarhus University.

It was also a fascinating climb through the limits of plant tolerances as we rose from sea level to over 1300m in just a few kilometers. Sometimes the .all.life happens vertically!

04/08/2022

Off to Ella Ø. 🇬🇱

30/07/2022

A century of research challenged…the value of checking the night shift. / For the past 100 years or so, bees have gotten all the credit as the key pollinator for red clover - a valuable agricultural plant. It turns out, moths may also pull an important turn as pollinators during the night, a time window little observed by scientists. Researchers found that about 1/3 of all pollinator visits were by moths during the night, and those plants visited by moths also had higher seed yields. This was made possible by using tine lapse cameras, some taking photos as often as every 5 minutes day and night. This raises new questions for scientists to explore, such as: ‘what is the broader role of moths in pollinating crops, and how widespread is this interaction?’ This research paper can be found open access and free of charge in the journal Biology Letters, by Jamie Alison et al, ‘Moths complement bumblebee pollination of red clover: a case for day and night insect surveillance.’ / Backstory: I’m not involved with this research, but I love working in and around univeristy environments because you are constantly exposed to interesting stories about how ideas form or how projects unfold. It’s also a fun challenge when a friend asks you to come shoot a photo for a scientific press release an hour before they head to the train station for more fieldwork! I was happy with the ‘night moth’ shot we were able to snag with a limited kit and intense time-pressure, and to see it widely shared online. A perfect photo? Certainly not, but it got the job done :-)

29/07/2022

Radion Khudi gazes out the window of a MI-8 helicopter as it lumbers low over the late summer tundra of Yamal, Siberia. Despite decades of collaboration and planning, international research groups working with Russians and in Russia have now been fractured with limited prospects for near term solutions. Under different circumstances we’d be seeing these same views right now; our minds, memory cards, and notebooks full of new knowledge about reindeer impacts on tundra change that we set up in 2018 with the Nenets herders. Instead, we just have these memories.

27/07/2022

A ‘lush’ valley in high-arctic Ellesmere Island. This is Canada’s northernmost island, and second only to Greenland in northernmost landmasses on the planet. Much of the landscape is rocky and shows signs of recent deglaciation (in a geological sense), but of course, flowers abound! 2018

26/07/2022

Arctic poppies dot the ground around an abandoned seal butchering platform on Ellesmere Island, Canada. Despite being unused for decades, the ground here still retains enough nutrients to turn this desolate high Arctic gravel patch into a flower garden. Looking at where plants do and do not grow in an environment can unlock many stories about the past. // From a 2018 trip with research teams from University of British Columbia, Dartmouth College, and the University of Edinburgh.

06/07/2022

is headed back to Qikiqtaruk! Here’s a series from 2019 showing going about biodiversity sampling in her quest to find those species that may be hiding in plain sight. She is now off working on a prestigious postdoc elsewhere, but many new faces will be joining Prof. Isla Myers-Smith, the Yukon Parks Rangers, and the other science and heritage teams on the island in the coming weeks. I can’t join this summer, but you can (well, via instagram!). Head over to the account to meet the 2022 field team.

29/06/2022

Excited to chat with today about plants, Greenland, and how we measure and think about the ‘edges of life’. Said another way…why are species where they are, and where are they headed next? Plants and animals have many tricks for surviving harsh Arctic conditions…but one of the best is simply to hide from the elements! What other cold-weather adaptations do you see here? .all.life

25/06/2022

Looking down the fjord from Ella Ø. There is a long term research presence on this small island situated in the midst of the fjord systems of NE Greenland. It has one of the few protected harbors in the region, and even a short dirt runway where twin otters (airplanes) can land. From 2021 with . 🇬🇱

24/06/2022

Northeast Greenland has some big views.

20/06/2022

Summer night in . Wandering around the city kept me sane during lockdown, and it continues to reveal little gems as areas grow, reinvent, or reveal themselves. These small garden plots are out by at the harbor.

16/06/2022

The Elders and youth program on Qikiqtaruk helps some community members from Aklavik and Inuvik visit the island to share knowledge and connect with its past and future. The games of tag can get pretty intense! From a long summer day in 2019.

01/05/2022

Caribou used to inhabit nearly all coastal regions of Greenland, but now can only be found in the west. They have a critical role in the economy and culture of many communities in this part of Greenland, and their historical connections with Greenlandic society and human migrations dates back millennia.

Some populations of caribou in the east only went extinct in early 1900s, though it has likely been far longer since they were found in the far north. Bones and antlers there date as far back as 6000 years old, though some were likely brought there by humans as they hunted and passed through during warmer historical periods. No permanent human settlements remain in northern Greenland.

This book is a classic text on the history of caribou populations in Greenland. I relied on it extensively while planning my PhD in Greenland several years ago, and it remains a go to resource as we try to anticipate what we might find while we survey during the .all.life this summer, lead by .buma with Ole Bennike and Kim Young ()

18/04/2022

Permafrost thawing away on Qikiqtaruk (Herschel Island) in the summer of 2019. This ice rich thaw slump is one of the largest in the region. Humans (of
) for scale in the lower left!

12/04/2022

The irresistible pull of a dirt pit. Juvenile geladas will spend hours messing around in here while their parents eat and groom. This week, I’m looking back across 10 years photos captured at the Guassa Community Conservation Area in Ethiopia. If you are around Copenhagen on Weds (13 Apr), I’ll share many of these images and the stories behind them in a talk at 7pm at the Natural History Museum of Denmark (). The very talented will also be presenting his incredible primate portraits gathered from around the world. See the link in my stories or reach out for more info.

11/04/2022

A male gelada monkey walking back to the sleeping cliffs before the beasties come out at night... This week, I’m looking back across 10 years photos captured at the Guassa Community Conservation Area in Ethiopia. If you are around Copenhagen this Weds, I’ll share many of these images and the stories behind them in a talk at 7pm at the Natural History Museum of Denmark. The very talented will also be presenting his incredible primate portraits gathered from around the world. See the link in my stories or reach out for more info.

10/04/2022

Looking back || Young gelada monkeys will ride on their mothers backs as the herd moves from place to place. This week, I’m looking back across 10 years photos from at the Guassa Community Conservation Area. If you are around Copenhagen this week, I’ll share many of these images and the stories behind them in a talk at 7pm this Weds at the Natural History Museumof Denmark. The very talented will also be presenting his incredible primate portraits captured from around the world. See the link in my stories or reach out for more info.