When you are camping by Centrum Sø Lake on the northeast tip of Greenland with over 7 billion people far to the south of you, “remote” is hardly a just descriptor. So on a hike back to their lakeside basecamp, the last thing National Geographic grantee and cave scientist Gina Moseley and her team expected to find was a pile of unopened cans in the middle of the arctic desert.

The team had been camping for three weeks and was just coming back from collecting cave samples to add to paleoclimate records­–records that study how the climate has changed throughout the history of Earth.

“It’s a nice thing in Greenland … there’s no rubbish because, of course, there’s nobody there,” says