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. Our basic idea is to extract cores throughout the next few years of the upper 8 meters of glacier in the accumulation area and see if we can measure changes in their density. That is, if the water is refreezing within the firn (snow from previous years that is slowly getting buried by more recent snow) there, then the density of the firn should be increasing.

The weather pattern lately has been reasonably good weather in the mornings and poor weather in the afternoon, and we’ve adapted our schedule to that. Several days ago we had thunder and lightening nearby in the afternoon, and yesterday and today we had rain, snow, fog, and sunshine, often in the same hour. So Jason and Joey headed out at 5:30AM to get a jump on the weather and also drill while it was still cold, hoping to keep the drill from getting stuck. In the morning I had mostly been trying to catch up on phone calls to stay ahead on logistics for later parts of the trip and keep other projects moving along. In the afternoon today I went up to the upper cirque to check out Jason’s latest borehole, and drop the video camera into it. Unfortunately I don’t have the cable it takes to download the video to a computer, otherwise I would post it. It’s a neat area, with alternating layers of ice and firn beneath the surface. Our expectation is that the ice lenses are going to grow with time, due to the refreezing of surface meltwater. So the cores and measurements we’re making now are the baseline against which we can compare future accumulation. A major challenge in assessing these changes is simply getting a handle on the variability in the baseline measurements, which is substantial. That is, you cant drill a borehole in the same place twice (because the second time there is just a hole there), so you have to drill some distance to the side of the original, but without knowing the spatial variability (are two locations a meter apart identical?) in the measurements, you would have no way of knowing whether a temporal change (are two cores taken a month apart identical?) occurred or a spatial one. So by doing a lot of coring and pit digging now, we can get a better handle on these spatial variations so we have a better baseline to assess whether temporal changes occurred.


Jason and Joey head off to storm the castle.


The view down a shallow borehole. You can see alternating layers of thin ice layers between thicker firn layers. Possibly the ice layers represent annual layering, but it’s not really clear. You can also see the cable and light from the borehole video camera.


Drilling is hard work…


But successful thus far.

One of the more exciting accomplishments of the trip was the Turner learned to ski yesterday. We were done at the cache organizing some food and took the opportunity to help Turner carve. In the past, he has been reluctant to put on the skis, but today he said he wanted to try it. So we strapped them on and tried to give him the idea of how it works. He picked up amazingly quickly, and actually managed to slide downhill a few meters on his own without falling. Personally I think this ranks with learning to walk.


Turner, ski stud.


Turner’s first time on skis.


Ten minutes later he’s a pro.


Looks like we’ll be regulars at the annual ski swap.


Skiing is hard work.