This was our last trip to Athabasca Glacier for our NSF funded borehole study. It's always bittersweet when a project ends. On the one hand it is nice to have all the data in hand and come to a successful conclusion. This was a complicated project with many boreholes drilled and over 100 borehole sensors that my graduate student David Polashenski built. There are some inevitable data loss issues, but overall we've had great success and I'm looking forward to the data analysis and the papers that we will now be working on.
Summer 2023 was particularly warm here with lots of glacier loss. By the time we got back here to clean up, most of our instruments had melted out and some fallen over. But I'm happy that we got everything cleared up.
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Our GPS antennas had seen some serious melt. This was all level with the snow surface in spring
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A view across the glacier to the tourist access road
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We had a weather station here, view towards the ice fall
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We also met a JPL/NASA team. They were field testing an early version of a very cool robot (EELS) with the ultimate goal of sending it to Enceladus to explore its cryovolanoes.
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This is a nice view from across the valley that really shows the amount of glacier loss that has occurred in the past 100+ years.
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