As part of our project on Sít' Tlein (Malaspina Glacier) we decided to do field work on the upper glacier (also known as the Seward Glacier). The goal was to deploy several radars: one to measure the ice thickness and one to measure the annual snow fall. Both of these things are very poorly constrained in the area. Since this part of the glacier is in Canada, we drove to Kluane Lake and deployed from there.
I was a bit nervous about this work, because this is an area of the world that can be hit with big storms that make it inaccessible by air for long periods of time. But we got lucky and hit an unbelievable stretch of amazing weather.
The area is incredibly spectacular. We were camped between the giant mountains of Mt. Logan, Mt. St. Elias (Yasʼéitʼaa Shaa, "the mountain behind Icy Bay), Mt. Vancouver, Mt. Augusta, Mt. Cook, ... Huge mountains on every side of us. Mt. St. Elias rises straight out of the ocean to over 5400 m (18'000 ft). Mt. Logan is even higher and is incredibly massive. It is often claimed to be the most massive non-volcanic mountain in the world.
The work was successful. We measured over 60 km of ground penetrating radar profiles to find the amount of annual snow fall, which we also verified with several shallow cores. Our deep radar recorded ice thickness to over 1500 m. Amazing to stand in the middle of this vast expanse of ice and think that the base is still at or below sea level.
 |
Icefield Discovery put us in with their Helio Courier.
|
 |
The weather was mostly good, but we did have a little bit of bad weather and even some rain.
|
 |
Deep radar requires very long wavelength radars and hence very long antennas!
|
Our field location was well protected from wind by all the big mountains around us, but we saw some beautiful lenticular clouds all around us, indicating that it wasn't quite as calm above us.
 |
Mt. Logan
|
 |
Mt. Augusta
|
 |
Mt. Cook
|
 |
Mt. Logan. The top is 4,500 m (15,000 ft) above us
|
No comments:
Post a Comment