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...

Drilling stopped about 4AM when the core barrel came up dripping wet. Water? Seventy meters down within the accumulation area of an arctic glacier? Is that unusual? I really have no idea, though I was surprised by it. We had expected the ice here to be about 150 m thick, based on radar we had done earlier not too far away. So to hit liquid water only halfway down was a big surprise. We had gone to a night-time drilling schedule because of the problems the sun was creating by getting the core stuck due to melting snow. I say “we” in the royal sense, as it is really Bella, Terry, Darek, and Ryo that are doing all of the coring work. I walk over every once in a while and try to look official, but my time has been mostly occupied by sorting gear, finding tools or solutions t...

Drilling progress slowed substantially with an improvement in the weather, then stopped completely as we focused on staying alive during a storm. The past few days had been overcast, with no direct sun. With the sun out in full force yesterday, snow began melting on the core barrel and then re-freezing again once it was lowered back in the hole where it was colder. This is problematic because when the core barrel gets stuck in the outer section, the core can be damaged when trying to extract it. So we decided to stop work in the early afternoon and start again at 5AM before the sun came up. At dinner time, the wind had picked up a bit, and continued to grow stronger through the evening. By 3AM, it had intensified quite a bit, and I began to be concerned about the integrity of our tents. At...

After years of planning, failures, and considerable efforts, we have finally extracted the first section of our deep ice core from McCall Glacier. Ice cores from glaciers around the world provide the best record of climate over the past 100 to 100,000 years. No other sources of information provide such long-term, high temporal-resolution or accurate information on climate. McCall Glacier sits inside of essentially a black hole of climate information -- there are neither long-term weather station records nor proxy paleo-climate records in this large region of the Arctic. The ice on McCall Glacier is several hundred years old, and in each of those years clues as to what the weather was like that year get trapped within a layer of snow, which then gets buried by the next year’s layer. Over ...

The big day is here and the weather is good – it’s time to live and work on an arctic glacier for the next few months. I gave our pilot Dirk a call at 7AM to let him know that the weather looked fine in Kaktovik, and he confirmed that the weather in Coldfoot, where his airplane is based, looked good too. So we decided to go for it. It’s a little over a two hour flight for Dirk to fly his DeHavilland Beaver from Coldfoot to Kaktovik, which gave us some time for breakfast and shuttling the rest of our gear down to the airport. The airport in Kaktovik is not like those found in most cities. There is no TSA, there are no parking meters, and there’s not even a building to wait around in. It’s just a runway on a gravel spit between the ocean and the mainland, with an old...