Hercules producing air pollution at Summit

Today I intented to write a short explanation on the kind of measurements we are doing here but the plan has changed. Another C-130 Hercules came in also to bring, as usual, cargo, this time only one passenger and pick up a number of people longing to go home, like our colleague, Claudia. She has been here for about 5 weeks and has done most of the daily/weekly/monthly maintenance tasks alone except of some time together with another colleague, Detlev. She was already some days looking forward to go home. Today she left with 10 others and now we are back to 21 people here at Summit.
The use of these relative old and "smoking" airplanes is actually quite an issue for our measurements. Since we are trying to measure the exchange of chemical compounds for the pristine unpolluted snow-ice sheet of Greenland we don't want to have such a plane effecting the flux measurements. In the movie you can see how the "smoke plume" of the waiting Hercules disperses and passes our flux site on the right hand side.

Because of this pollution problem they are now also considering to actually bring in the cargo and fuel not anymore by plane but using tractors to pull it all the way from Thule (west coast of Greenland) with sleds. They are currently testing if this is feasible but it seems that they are already using this system at Antartica with success.
Laurens