Sunshine melts snow, but it also turns it into vapor which tends to rise and later condense into clouds. At McCall Glacier, we have the neat opportunity of watching this happen before our eyes. Today was a sunny, clear day, at least on the synoptic scale of regional weather. But once the sun rose high enough to increase its energy flux to the surface, it began creating clouds locally. Because our camp sits within a bowl shaped valley, we can watch the sun as it swings from the east to the west in a big circle and heats up the backside of our valley walls. So when the sun is in the east, we see clouds forming directly behind our eastern valley wall, and as it swings to the south we see clouds there but not in the east, and so on. To better visualize this, I took a sequence of panoramas thro...

One of the questions Jason is trying to answer as part of his PhD is ‘How much of the snow that falls here gets refrozen within the glacier and how we can apply this knowledge to improve our ability to model this process on other glaciers?’ So the past two days Jason and Joey have been busy getting more experienced with the shallow coring drill and developing a plan for measurements for the next few years. It’s a tricky question and one that has not been answered well as yet, largely because it is so tricky to make direct measurements of this internal accumulation of ice. The state of the art paper was written 30 years ago, based in part on research done on McCall Glacier. So it seems like there is still a lot of progress that can be made if the right work plan could be developed. Ou...

We left early again today to install two more stakes, this time in locations we have previously installed stakes. The glacier is always in motion, and in these locations it moves about 15 meters per year. This means the stake we installed last year is now 15 meters down-glacier. We keep installing poles at the same initial location so that we can track how the glacier’s speed is changing with time. We cant just keep measuring the same pole because the glacier’s speed varies with location, and as the pole moves into a new location its speed will change. In this case the fastest moving part of the glacier is about 2/3s of the way towards the terminus, above and below this it moves slower. By installing poles each year in the same initial location, we can then tell whether that part of th...

Like a switch was flipped, we changed from winter to spring, in several ways. A few feet of fresh snow had fallen during the last week of May and early June. Then we had 3 days of warm, mostly sunny weather, just long enough to get the drill gear and team out and the newest member of team in. By the time Dirk took off with our final load of gear, a serious rain had begun and spring was here – the snow was melting, the streams were running, and we began scrambling to catch up on all of the winter work we had wanted to get done in the past month but just didn’t have the time or weather. With this new weather also came a change in work dynamics, with just five us now and all focused on our process studies, we are a much leaner and more focused team, concentrated on supporting Jason’s pr...

A 150-meter ice core pulled from the McCall Glacier in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge this summer may offer researchers their first quantitative look at up to two centuries of climate change in the region. The core, which is longer than 1 1/2 football fields, is the longest extracted from an arctic glacier in the United States, according to Matt Nolan, an associate professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Institute of Northern Engineering who has led research at McCall Glacier for the past six years. The sample spans the entire depth of the glacier and may cover 200 years of history, he said. What we hope is that the climate record will extend back into the Little Ice Age,said Nolan. Up until the late 1800s these glaciers were actually gr...

Contents: 1. Report from St Petersburg meetings and conference 2. Plans for February 25th, 2009 3. Upcoming Polar Days: People & Above The Poles 4. Call for Sessions at Oslo Science Conference June 2010 Report no. 15, July 2008 From: IPY International Programme Office To: IPY Project Coordinators cc: IPY Community Google Groups 1. Report from St Petersburg meetings and conference Many members of the IPY Community are currently meeting in St Petersburg and Moscow for a range of business meetings as well as participation in the SCAR/IASC Open Science Conference. So far, the events have been a great success. We have so far participated in meetings for the IPY Joint Committee...

Flying over the Greenland Ice Sheet several days ago, scientist Mark Behn was surprised to see South Lake still full of sapphire-blue water. The 2- to 3-kilometer-wide lake forms each spring and summer, fed by melting ice. The water eventually builds up so much weight that it cracks the ice at the bottom of the lake, and the water drains away through the ice. That should have already happened by now. Mark was thrilled to see the still-brimming lake. Rarely have scientists had an opportunity to witness a draining lake, which is why they put many instruments around the lakes to capture the action while they are not there. Mark and his colleagues had just gotten word that another lake they were scheduled to visit, North Lake, had just drained. “We just missed it,” he said....

Contents: 1. Report from St Petersburg meetings and conference 2. Plans for February 25th, 2009 3. Upcoming Polar Days: People & Above The Poles 4. Call for Sessions at Oslo Science Conference June 2010 Report no. 15, July 2008 From: IPY International Programme Office To: IPY Project Coordinators cc: IPY Community Google Groups 1. Report from St Petersburg meetings and conference Many members of the IPY Community are currently meeting in St Petersburg and Moscow for a range of business meetings as well as participation in the SCAR/IASC Open Science Conference. So far, the events have been a great success. We have so far participated in meetings for the IPY Joint Committee...

What's it like to be a research scientist working in the Arctic and Antarctica? In celebration of the International Polar Year, the Exploratorium gave polar scientists cameras and blogs and asked them to document their fieldwork in real time. The result is a groundbreaking Web-based project, Ice Stories: Dispatches from Polar Scientists (http://icestories.exploratorium.edu), where you can follow along on the scientists’ research, ask questions, and share ...

Karen Harper, Adjunct Professor at the School of Resource and Environmental Studies at Canada's Dalhousie University, writes: As leader of a national IPY project on treeline, I thought it was essential to travel to the Arctic at least once during International Polar Year, but it was not easy. Last year, my daughter was born on February 14, 2007. (I had hoped for an IPY baby born at the start of IPY on March 1st since she was due March 5, but she decided to come early on Valentine’s Day.) Because she is breastfed and does not take bottles at night, I could not travel without her last year. In fact, she still nurses at night and I cannot travel without her this year either. Travel and field work in the North is difficult for everyone, and it is even more diff...