There are three graduate students on this trip: Darek Ignatiuk, Ryo Kusaka, and Jason Geck. Our project is part of the IPY Glaciodyn effort, an international project focusing on the role of arctic glaciers in the global system, involving more than a dozen countries. To facilitate exchange of ideas and comparisons between glacier systems, as part of this larger project we try to exchange personnel on field trips whenever possible, and Darek and Ryo are part of that exchange.

Darek is from Poland and is a graduate student at the University of Silesia in Katowice, studying under Dr. Jacek Jania. His interests are broadly based but have an emphasis on surface energy and mass balance. His primary glacier field work has been in Svalbard, working on glaciers around the Polish Polar Station there. As a result of our field work this spring, we now plan to make some better comparisons between McCall Glacier and these Svalbard glaciers in terms of the processes of surface melt, internal accumulation, and ice temperature variations with climate.



Ryo is a from Japan and is a student at the Kitami Institute of Technology. He has just finished his undergraduate work and will be starting graduate school there next year, studying under Dr. Shuhei Takahashi. Shuhei has been to McCall Glacier several times, studying near surface air temperatures, mass balance variations, mapping the firn area with ground penetrating radar, and ice coring. Ryo’s main interests at the moment are the study of the snow and ice crystals and the atmospheric conditions that control their shape and size, and surface mass balance.



Jason is from Anchorage Alaska most recently, where he teaches GIS and environmental science at Alaska Pacific University. He is a graduate student at UAF, working with me on McCall Glacier. His primary interests are ice volume change in the Brooks Range, and the impacts of these changes on the aquatic ecology downstream on the coastal plain. Part of understanding these changes is studying the processes of snowmelt and how much of this water refreezes within the glacier and how much runs off.



Darek and Ryo are flying out today, if all goes well, and will spend a few days in Fairbanks before heading back to their homes. It was a great pleasure working with them, and I hope they will come back often.

Because our request for internet on the glacier were not supported by our funding agency, this will likely be the last blog posting until early July, when Kristin, Turner and I head back to Kaktovik to help with the mapping project, and can send out the next batch of posts from there. At that time we hope to create a new topographic map of all of the glaciers in the eastern Brooks Range (about 400 or so) using an airborne lidar system operated by AeroMetric from Anchorage. If all goes well, we will have that wrapped up in about two weeks, after a brief stint in civilization we will return for another six weeks of glacier and stream field studies. Joey Williams, a school teacher from Anchorage, will hopefully arrive today and help Jason with the process studies while we are away. She will fly out in early August, at the same time as another team from the University of Southern Mississippi will be leaving. They will be here about a week to install a new weather station and study airborne pollen and determine how much gets trapped in the snow, facilitating our paleoclimate analysis of the deep core from the upper cirque. So we have a busy summer planned, but we are all in good spirits and looking forward to the challenge and fun.