After a night of repositioning the drill and coring about 20 meters, the drill crew slept during the day as Jason and I headed downglacier to explore the lower valley to prepare for a hydrological monitoring during summer. Most of the snow and ice that melts on the glacier during summer ends up at the stream which emerges from under the terminus. By studying the stream and its dynamics, we can potentially learn many things about how the glacier works. For example, we know from previous studies using GPS to measure ice velocity, that the glacier moves faster on hot sunny days than it does on cloudy days. The reason has something to do with meltwater reaching the bottom of the glacier and by studying the stream that comes out we can gain more clues about exactly how this increased meltwater ...

Camp is on a bit of a funny schedule, with half the folks working at night and the rest during the day. It feels like the issue we face all the time in Alaska, with considering the 4 hour time difference in the east coast. So we leave notes for each other to read when we wake up. This morning we got a note saying that the drill had hit a rock at 70 m and it could not get past it to drill the remaining 60 meters or so of ice. Most drills working on ice are not designed to penetrate rock, and this is certainly the case with the two types of drills we have here. For holes 2 and 3, our main scientific interest is just the hole itself, so that we can install a thermistor string into it to measure temperature. In my initial request for support (and several times afterwards), I had recommended th...

Click on the panorama and drag to look around, press Shift to zoom in, Command (Mac) or Control (PC) to zoom out. With the drill crew on the night shift, Jason, Kristin, Turner and I tried to keep things moving on the day shift. The morning began mostly by sorting through boxes, trying to organize stuff that had been disorganized by the move (or never organized in the first place). But by lunch time we were all headed up to the Upper Cirque. There we tried to do some ‘final’ sorting of gear for what needed to be left there to support Jason’s studies of internal accumulation and what should be brought to each of the 4 other cac...

By afternoon the day after moving to our new location, the drill was set up and the first cores taken. Unfortunately it was great, warm weather – nice for us, but not for the drilling as the cold cores kept freezing in the core barrel. So, having convinced ourselves that everything was functional, the Bella, Terry, Darek, and Ryo took naps so that they could begin drilling again after dinner when the air temperatures dropped. By about 9PM drilling recommenced, and at a rapid pace. The work flow was well thought out and everyone knew their role. By 4AM, ice at 25 meters depth had been extracted. At this rate, we’d be at the bottom in five days, and ready to move to our next site. ...

With the hole finished, the drill team lost no time in breaking down the drill and making it ready to transport downglacier to our next site. It was a beautiful morning, though a bit odd in that we essentially had blue skies and light snow. While the drill team packed, Jason assembled some GIS files to help us plot our next drilling location. We knew where we wanted it to within about 100 meters, but now it was time to choose THE spot. The purpose of this hole is to help us better understand the strange ice dynamics we observe here, about 5 kilometers down from our current location, by planting another thermistor string in the hole. We know from prior work that a substantial part of the ice surface motion we measure here is due to enhanced basal motion, meaning that the ice is either slidi...

The day started out clear and cold, and like normal we lowered our borehole camera into the hole to check the water level and look for salmon. The level was up substantially, to about 30 meters from the surface. Drilling proceeded throughout the day, with the usual amount of minor issues to solve, mostly related to water freezing on the drill. In anticipation of perhaps hitting the bottom sometime soon, Jason and I attached the data logger box, for the thermistor string we hope to install in the empty hole, onto the nearby weather station mast. After a number of other odd jobs throughout the day, I was on the phone with Ken in Fairbanks trying to troubleshoot our internet problems when Terry shouted that we had hit the bottom. Apparently the thermal drill hadn’t moved in q...

Progress continues to be made, but mild storms have slowed things down. The winds aren’t as strong as our first big storms, but they are strong enough that it makes drilling and logging more difficult than its worth. We began placing bets as to how thick the ice was here, but everyone lost the first round, fooled by the presence of water so early on. Now the bets lay in the 130-155m range. Bella demonstrating her technique for removing slush from the drill cable. Note the difference in apparent thickness of the cable above and below her gloves. ...

The story of liquid water within the ice beneath the accumulation area gets more interesting every day. Terry and Darek extract some clear ice on a nice day. Click on the panorama and drag to look around, press Shift to zoom in, Command (Mac) or Control (PC) to zoom out. We knew that the ice here would be warm relative to the mean annual air temperature, but none of us suspected that there would be liquid water within the ice. After our first encounter with water at about 70 meters depth, we’ve been tracking water level in the hole over time. Every time we drill deeper, the water level drops. But after a fe...

After encountering water at about 70 meters depth within the glacier, we made it about another 10 slushy meters with the electro-mechanical drill before switching over to a thermal drill. Rather than spin an auger through the ice to retrieve a core, this drill melts its way down by capturing a core within a barrel with a hot ring at the tip. Switching over between systems is normally a cumbersome process which requires cutting a cable and resoldering a bunch of connections – each time the switch is made. For this trip, however, someone had craftily created an adapter cable which would have eliminated the soldering, except that the wrong plug had been attached at one end. This required using an unnecessary part of the electro-mechanical drill to further adapt the systems without soldering...

Though I’m the lead scientist of the trip and responsible for making sure all of our goals are successful, the main task delegated to me personally is to document the state of McCall Glacier through photographs during this IPY. By photographs, I’m talking about gigapixel imagery – photomosaics composed of dozens to hundreds of individual photographs seamlessly merged together into a single image. A low resolution 360 degree panorama from the survey location. Click on the panorama and drag to look around, press Shift to zoom in, Command (Mac) or Control (PC) to zoom out. My idea is to photograph the entire vall...