Black Rapids Glacier

Once a year we try to get to Black Rapids Glacier to measure mass balance. This series is now several decades old; it was started in the early 70s by the U.S. Geological Survey, but now it is just a weekend plane trip with Chris and myself (and whoever is lucky enough to join us!). Last year we never made it, because of long stretches of difficult weather with lots of wind. So this year we didn't want to take chances and went at our first opportunity, which turned out to be a glorious day.

Mt. Hess, on the way to Black Rapids (Photo: Joanna Young)

Landing on Black Rapids, Trinity Basin (Photo: Joanna Young)

Short final (Photo: Joanna Young)

A view back up the Black Rapids Glacier. In the foreground are the (snow covered) landslides that resulted from the 2002 Denali Fault earthquake (Photo: Joanna Young)

Chris and I are getting ready for putting in a mass balance stake (Photo: Pascal Buri)

A Decade of Glacier Exploration

Recently, NASA put together a nice video highlighting some of the airborne survey flights we do: https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2855/a-decade-of-exploring-alaskas-mountain-glaciers/

Athabasca Glacier - revisited

Athabasca Glacier in Jasper National Park (Canada) is where Charlie Raymond, one of my glaciological heros, completed his PhD work in the 1960s. He looked at how the sliding motion of the glacier was distributed across the glacier, which is something that is still ignored in many models of ice flow. My collaborator Billy Armstrong from Appalachian State University had the idea to redo these measurements 50 years later to investigate how the motion of the glacier has changed after half a century of mass loss, when the glacier has lost about a quarter of its ice in the lower reaches. So next year we plan to drill some boreholes to the bottom of the ice and measure ice deformation and basal motion.

To prepare for this work we visited the glacier in early March to establish a weather station and do a lot of profiling with an ice penetrating radar to find the glacier bed location. It turns out that we picked a particularly cold period; our car thermometer showed less than -30C when we started out on our trip. At the same time it was near melting in Fairbanks! This made for some cold camping, but we were rewarded with sunny days in a gorgeous landscape.

I'm getting the ice penetrating radar configured (Photo: Greg Horne, Parks Canada)

Radar surveying (Photo: Greg Horne, Parks Canada)

Photo: Greg Horne, Parks Canada

Establishing a weather station (Photo: Greg Horne, Parks Canada)

One of many avalanches near the ice fall from the Columbia Icefield (Photo: Greg Horne, Parks Canada)

One of the many depth profiles we collected. The deepest spot on this part of the glacier is about 300 m.

The camp on a beautiful morning ...

... and on a cold evening.