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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...
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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...
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Monday, 09 June 2008 02:23
Day 48: Installing survey stakes to measure index velocities
Written by Matt Nolan
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...
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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...
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By Antony Jinman
(Read the full report, with photos and a map, via this downoadable PDF.
This is an expedition that I put together to take part in the International Polar Year. I put this together because I’m a strong believer that one person can help make a difference. Its aims are to promote The International Polar Year and our charity British Schools Exploring Society and its 75 anniversary, by conducting school visits both on Baffin Island and here in the United Kingdom.
It took 12 months to put together, over which time there where many highs and many lows and in true expedition style it didn’t exactly all go according to plan. Many decisions were hard to make and...
Thursday, 05 June 2008 06:26
Day 43-44: Meet the grad students (from Poland, Japan, and Alaska)
Written by Matt Nolan
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...
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Tuesday, 03 June 2008 06:17
Day 41-42: Final camp move, a little more coring, and the last of the ice leaves
Written by Matt Nolan
With the deep drilling finished, it was time to start transitioning fully into our process studies on McCall Glacier. What we are particularly interested in this year is the fate of surface snow melt. How much of this drips into the snow pack and refreezes? How much reaches the bottom the glacier and helps the glacier move faster? To answer these questions we are planning to track this meltwater throughout the year. We will do this by repeatedly coring the upper 10 meters or so of snow in the accumulation areas, and by studying the stream at the outlet of the glacier. This is logistically complicated because these two areas are at opposite ends of the glacier – the very top and the very bottom. Separated by seven kilometers, this means a lot of hiking back and forth to try to watch both ...
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Sunday, 01 June 2008 21:34
McCall Glacier panoramas and videos bring home life on the glacier
Written by Stefan Geens
Together with a team of scientists, University of Alaska's Matt Nolan has been spending the past 6 weeks on Alaska's McCall Glacier, extracting ice cores and installing thermistor string. And he's been blogging it, using some very innovative multimedia tools to bring home what life on the glacier is like.
The main blogging challenge has been getting his posts, photos and videos from the glacier to your browser. Connections to the outside world are very sparse, so the first batch of blog posts and content, from April 22 to May 11, have only just now been delivered to IPY.org, via USB thumb drive flown back to civilization.
The wait has been worth it:
...
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Jason and I were near our second camp location installing a continuously-recording D-GPS system on the ice when we heard Darek’s voice on the radio “We finished!” The third and final hole of this trip was completed. We quickly finished hooking up the wires and cables for the GPS system and confirmed it was working, then headed up to lower cirque to drop down our thermistor string.
Yesterday had been largely a bust in terms of drilling, as well as most other things. The weather continued to remain snowy and windy, and conditions on the glacier were poor for travel as the snow was deep, the trail drifted over, and visibility was frequently zero. I used one break in the weather to pack down the skiway, but that was the extent of my travel away from camp. The drill team tr...
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