We spent this morning leisurely packing in the sun, but by the time we actually moved, conditions were about as desperate as we’ve dealt with in the past 2 months. I shuttled Jason and Joey down to the weather station, where our second borehole camp was, about noon. The glacier then was covered by high, dark clouds, but the coastal plain was crystal clear and we didn’t have much thought about the weather. By the time I returned to get Kristin and Turner, however, rain showers had begun and the skies darkened. It didn’t take long to load up and started heading down the hill, but by the time we started down it began to hail. We hoped it was just a quick cloud burst, but by the time we were at the bottom of the hill, lightening was striking all around us and the hail was intensifying. B...

Today I was up at 5:30AM to try to complete the work I attempted yesterday. Jason and Joey were up earlier, getting ready to complete the drilling they started yesterday too. After shuttling them up to the upper cirque, I headed down the terminus with a load of science gear and food, trying to take advantage of the crystal clear skies for my 50 year repeat photo of the terminus. The clear night had hardened the snow, but also made the ice surface slick. So slick in fact that I had to drop off the sled before the last hill because the ice provided no traction for the sled and made it tend to try to get in front of the snow machine. On the way to the photo site I took a few quick panoramas of the stream and aufeis, while the terminus was still in the shade of the early morning. I had forgott...

On our return from the terminus, the clock began ticking once again with deadlines. Kristin, Turner and I need to be in Kaktovik by July 1, and a lot of preparations are needed before we leave: we have to pack for a week at the terminus doing stream work, a several day hike to our airstrip on the tundra, for two weeks in Kaktovik, for a one week trip to Colorado after that, for a hike back in to the glacier in late July, and for another month or so on the glacier. Because we are avoiding helicopter use, anything we have here that we need on any of these trips we must now hike out with. Plus we need a good inventory of what’s here so we know what else we need to bring back with us, especially in terms of food. For example, I need a computer in Kaktovik plus all of my files, so I need to p...

We left the terminus today having succeeded with most of what we wanted to accomplish there. This morning we tested out the fluorometer, a device that ingests samples of water and tells you whether there is any dye in it before spitting it out again. The dye in this case is a glorified food coloring that we drop in by the teaspoon; it’s too diluted in the stream to see it, so the machine tells us whether its there or not. The idea is to put some in the stream on the glacier (that had the slush flow a few days earlier) before it disappears into a hole in the ice and see how long it takes to travel to outlet stream at the terminus where we are now. If it takes a short time, chances are there is a well developed conduit system beneath the glacier – basically a river. But if it takes a lon...

We knew that studying the stream would likely get us wet, but it wasn’t river water that soaked us today. Over night the weather detiorated further and we got rain and snow most of the night. This continued throughout the day without much of a break, though we did get a variety – snow, rain, sleet, freezing rain, slushy snow – pretty much anything that could fall around freezing. Nevertheless, it was still a productive day. One of our goals is to get a sense of how much water leaves the glaciers and flows towards the ocean, and then use this information to better understand how much water glaciers in this region contribute to the major rivers of this region. But this is tricky business. ‘Normally’ stream discharge is measured by attaching instruments to the pier o...

The glacier is just a visitor to this valley, and nowhere is this more obvious than at the terminus. Where the glacier has recently been is a jumble of debris where once was order, like the aftermath of Turner visiting his toy box. Hunks of rocks are strewn all over the place, some stranded in high places, some washed continuously in the river, and everywhere in between. Apparently the party is not completely over, as we witnessed a boulder the size of a school bus tumble down the mountain, catching air and doing flips before crashing into the valley floor not far from us. This is where geomorphology comes alive and works on time-scale faster than glacier motion. Jason and I were up at 6AM yesterday to begin staging equipment for our trip to the terminus, by shuttling a load...

Summer truly arrived today with an enormous slush flow which opened the main stream on the glacier. Slush flows are like low angle avalanches. Water slowly saturates the snow and makes it heavier and more fluid. At a certain point, the weight of the water can no longer be held back by the snow matrix and gravity takes over. Over the past few days we had been watching meltwater pool up within the stream channel from last year. This morning there was standing water visible within a large section of it. I set up a time-lapse camera hoping to capture it, and about 10PM it happened. I was in my work tent preparing for a few days of work at the terminus when I heard a loud roar. I ran out and saw a wall of slush and water working its way downglacier. We all stood and watched as the peak rushed p...

Our primary occupation the past few days has been studying lenses. Jason is studying ice lenses within the firn, and I’m studying glass lenses on my camera. It’s difficult to say who’s job is harder, but I suspect it’s Jason’s. Ice lenses are layers of ice that form within the snow. The surface of the snow warms up from the sun, melts, then drips into snow beneath it. When this water hits colder snow, it tends to freeze. When it does, it prevents more meltwater from dripping down further, since the ice is too dense for water to flow through. So the additional water has to spread out to the sides, where it too will find colder snow and freeze. This goes on throughout the day (or spring), such that wide layers of ice form within the snow. We call these ice lenses. As...

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...

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...