SUMMIT STATION, Greenland – Friends sometimes catch her gazing, entranced, at the wind ripples forming in the snow, or at the “diamond dust” glint of crystals delicately drifting down the Arctic air.
Her queen, Elizabeth II, may have hung the greatest honor, a Polar Medal, around her neck. But this Elizabeth’s greatest joy, despite ominous brushes with hungry polar bears and dying snowmobiles, still comes from skimming across a frozen landscape in search of the ground truth of ice and science.
“Travel,” scientists blithely call their risky research expeditions into the polar emptiness. And here once again Liz Morris was set to travel, a petite Englishwoman on the cusp of age 65 about to undertake a demanding, monthlong traverse down the 10,000-foot-high spine of the vast Greenland ice sheet — with a single assistant, two heavy-duty Ski-Doos and three wooden sleds piled with supplies and scientific gear.
