From April to September 2008, University of Alaska Fairbanks researcher Matt Nolan is living on McCall Glacier in Northern Alaska with his wife, son and fellow researchers, subjecting the glacier to a battery of tests... and blogging the process.

Because McCall Glacier is so remote, he’s only able to send his blog entries by plane every few weeks or so. We’ve just received — and posted — the most recent batch. You can access all of Matt’s posts via this link.

What makes Matt’s posts so interesting is that he uses an assortment of multimedia tools to get his message across. Not “just” text and photos, but also video (posted to YouTube and embedded here on IPY.org) and 360-degree panorama imagery. He’s even bee testing a large format film camera for taking high-resolution aerial shots.

You can find both video and panoramas distributed through his posts, but here are some of the highlights:

The following panorama, of wolf tracks, comes from this entry:


Click on the panorama and drag to look around, press Shift to zoom in, Command (Mac) or Control (PC) to zoom out. Enlarge this panorama

Jason is from Anchorage Alaska most recently, where he teaches GIS and environmental science at Alaska Pacific University. You can read more about him in this post, but here you see him on video:



And finally, here is low-resolution version of the high-resolution aerial imagery Matt’s been taking, taken from this entry:



Expect to see more posts by Matt Nolan in the near future.