Our first serious injury of the trip occurred today. People often ask me about the risks associated with working in the remote field, and my contention has always been that it is safer there than in civilization. In the field, the situation is simple – we need to be concerned about weather, animals and glacier travel, plus a few things associated with camp life like tent stability and stove safety. But in civilization, there are countless potential risks – things associated with vehicles, buildings, fuels, people, etc etc. In this case, we spent the late afternoon helping Walt shuttle passengers to the airport. The weather was marginal and not good enough to land, so we stayed down at the strip encouraging the Frontier pilot circling overhead to hang out to the last possible minute as ...

After our first night’s sleep in a bed, the anticipated chaos associated with our major lidar campaign began. Nick and Jessica from Aerometric showed up in the morning in their Piper Navajo equipped with their lidar unit. The lidar is essentially a laser beam that sweeps left to right as they fly forward, measuring the distance to the ground along a swath determined by the sweep angle of the lidar. In our case, this swath is a few kilometers wide by the time it reaches the ground from 12,000 feet. As they fly, a GPS unit in the plane is used to determine their position, corrected by the ground-based GPS we deployed in the field the day before. We also deployed a few more GPS here in Kaktovik to improve these corrections and give them some preliminary data to use to ensure the day’s acq...

Predators do shape the arctic fauna. This year, the den next door is the only den with young. We have counted 8 puppies but saw the smallest one dead within a few days. Two wildlife photographers have been visiting us and taken pictures like these. More about the marking of the puppies on www.arcticstation.nl. photo's by Jasper Doest (www.doest-photograp...

A 150-meter ice core pulled from the McCall Glacier in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge this summer may offer researchers their first quantitative look at up to two centuries of climate change in the region. The core, which is longer than 1 1/2 football fields, is the longest extracted from an arctic glacier in the United States, according to Matt Nolan, an associate professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Institute of Northern Engineering who has led research at McCall Glacier for the past six years. The sample spans the entire depth of the glacier and may cover 200 years of history, he said. “What we hope is that the climate record will extend back into the Little Ice Age,” said Nolan. “Up until the late 1800s these glaciers were actually gr...

University of Alaska Fairbanks glaciologist Matt Nolan has just completed the second phase of an extensive study of McCall Glacier in northern Alaska, briefly returning to civilization after over two months on the glacier with heaps of ice cores and measurements of glacier dynamics, but also with some great panoramic photos, timelapse photography, and videos of his young son Turner skiing for the first time. Matt’s daily documenting of what scientists (and his family) get up to on an glacier expedition has now been posted to IPY.org, with many new panoramas and video. You can read all of Matt’s entries, in reverse chronological order, but below are just some of the highlights: ...

Today we ended Phase Two of the project and began Phase Three. It started out bright and sunny, but by mid-morning the thunderheads had built up and by mid-afternoon we had been getting rain for a while. Dirk launched about 2PM from Coldfoot to come get us with his Beaver, now on tundra tires instead of skis, bringing John Sebert with him to deploy some GPS base stations. They showed up at our strip about 5:30PM, and we loaded up to set up another base station further up the valley before heading back to Kaktovik. The packraft deployed on the Jago River. ...

It began as a straightforward day, but quickly took a number of twists and turns. The biggest major wrinkle was that Jason discovered that he had forgotten a cable for the differential GPS. The idea was that we were going to survey the valley on our hike down and use these data as QC data for the lidar acquisition, planned to start in a few days. But he decided not to turn it on during our rock crossing as likely the antenna would get jostled too much to acquire reliable data, so we didn’t find out about the cable until now. So the choices were for one or more of us to go back and get it, or try to find an alternate cable and get it sent to Kaktovik fast. Given that it was Sunday in civilization, we opted to go back and get it. So Jason and Joey headed off – with no packs! – while Kr...

Tonight as we settled in to bed for the evening after the first day of our hike to the tundra, a herd of about 200 caribou ran through our camp heading towards the same destination. We began the day in fog and occasional drizzle, but the most annoying part of it was the thick swarms of mosquitos. Fortunately just as we began hiking, a small headwind picked up and kept them mostly at bay. The aufeis provided a bit of a highway for us on the way downhill, but it didn’t last long and soon we were in the worst section of hike – scrambling over large loose rocks covered with slippery wet lichen, to avoid the waterfall that forms in the bedrock constriction in the stream. This section is truly awful, especially when its wet, and the most nerve wracking for Kristin and I as it is the only sec...

Given that this is the first time we’ve worked at the stream, we were relieved to find out that our equipment was functioning as expected and recorded the flood that occurred during our move down here. I downloaded the time lapse cameras today and stitched the images into the movies below. These cameras were designed for hunters to figure out when is the best time to shoot deer or whatever, so they are not the highest quality. But they are cheap and waterproof, and suit our needs well enough. I stitched the images into the movies below. The date and time is stamped on the bottom of the image. We arrived on the 25th in the late afternoon, and you can see the stream start to rage at just about this time, due to the intense rainfall which has no where to go but into the stream. The plot bel...

Jason and Joey were up early this morning to shuttle the last remaining gear from the glacier, which was mostly related to a sonic distance ranger to be suspended over the stream to measure the water height over time. A week earlier we had suspended a cable across the stream at a location where the high banks would hopefully protect it from being washed away. Today we hung the sonic ranger on that cable, with the help of some metal conduit we salvaged from the glacier from previous campaigns. The idea is that once a minute, the unit beams down high frequency sound waves downwards onto whatever surface is beneath it. The waves then bounce off that surface and the unit receives them, counting the time it takes for this to happen. The speed of sound is a pretty straightforward function of air...