Black Rapids in summer

In all my years in Alaska I've spent about half a year on Black Rapids Glacier, but never in summer! So it was a new thing for me to be camped there on ice. We had a very quick trip, just two days to check in on all our instruments.

Since we've installed GPS stations in April, all the snow and quite a bit of ice has melted. The antennas that were originally at the surface were now sticking up by almost 3 m. We put them near the surface again, so they would be more stable.

 

Black Rapids was exposed to several really large landslides during the Denali Fault earthquake of 2002. The debris protects the glacier from melting, so every year, the rock covered ice stands out more, as the uncovered ice continues to melt. This also leads to the formation of lakes that occasionally drain.

 

One of the goals of this project is to measure how lake drainages affect the flow of the glacier, particularly in the area where the two main tributaries meet. Below is a timelapse sequence of the slow filling and rapid drainage of one ice marginal lake.

McCarthy summer school

Darn, just accidentally deleted this post. I'll try to recreate from the last saved draft...

The pictures are from the 2nd UAF International Summer School in Glaciology held in McCarthy in June. During that time I also had a chance to do some airborne radio echo sounding on the Harding Icefield.

Old surge moraines: Black Rapids Glacier

The beautiful Wrangell volcanoes

Hiking near Kennicott: Ed, Regine, Sonja

McCarthy: The Mekka of rock glaciers

Sonja on the Root Glacier

Ultima Thule Lodge. Lodge owner Paul Claus does a lot of our glacier flying

Prince William Sound: On the way to the Harding Icefield

Harding Icefield on the Kenai Peninsula

McCarthy

The old Hardware Store: our classroom

Summer school participants were camping

Some old mining buildings in McCarthy

Sonja: the youngest summer school participant

White out

Some pictures from our pilot, as we were working on the ice last Friday

Bell 212 in Greenland (Photo: Arne Fleischer)

Installing GPS (Photo: Arne Fleischer)

Spring trip to Nuuk

We are entering our last season of field work for our project in Nuuk where we are looking at glacier changes and try to relate those to conditions in the ocean. In a very quick trip, we visited all our over-winter stations (cameras, GPS, and seismic stations) and prepared them for summer.

The fjord just outside Nuuk

The glaciers at the end of the fjord

 The picture below shows Narssap Sermia, a glacier that was relatively stable until a few years ago. But then it woke up and in the past two years it retreated more than 2 km. The gray moraine shows land that was ice covered just a few years ago.

Narssap Sermia

Drained lake by Narssap Sermia

Unfortunately it had snowed a few days before we got here. The fresh white snow and the overcast weather made it very difficult to land on the glacier, and our GPS boxes provided the only reference for the ground.

GPS installation

One of the tools we use are cameras that are set up to take several pictures a day. Here is an example from Kangiata Nunata Sermia over this past winter.

Black Rapids Glacier

The northern hemisphere glacier field season has started. We have a new project on Black Rapids Glacier in the Alaska Range. This is probably my favorite glacier. It is where I did all the work for my PhD thesis, and I've spent several months up there since 1995. It's good to be back!
We flew in with Paul Claus, glacier pilot extraordinaire, in his Single Otter.

The field team (photo: R.Homberger)

Ultima Thule's Single Otter on skis

Two flights brought in the field team of four, a snow machine, all our instruments, and a tent camp with food.

Camp. Lokket tributary in the background

The goal of this project is to look at ice flow at the confluence of two big glacier. The picture below shows the main valley of Black Rapids (which follows the Denali Fault), and on the far side the Lokket tributary. We put up instruments to monitor the flow at this junction.

Mt. Meteor

Mt. McGinnis

The Trinity Basin (upper Black Rapids)

A particularly nice set of solar halos.

and .... nothing

On January 3, after more than a month of waiting at McMurdo, we finally boarded a LC-130 plane, and we found ourselves on the way to Pine Island Glacier (PIG). We landed at PIG main camp on a beautiful afternoon.

LC-130 arrival at PIG main camp

PIG main camp is impressive in its size. The photo below shows most of the bigger structures, which includes a large galley tent, and several tents for the helicopter operation, a medical tent, a comms tent, and a few others. Now all that was left was to wait for the helicopters to arrive. The plan was for two helicopters to be flown to PIG main in LC-130 aircraft. They would then be re-assembled and used to fly a hot water drill to the Pine Island ice shelf. We would then drill a hole through the shelf to make measurements underneath it. The main quantity of interest is the amount of melting under the ice shelf, because it determines its stability and fate.

PIG main camp

But all that was not to be. After all the planning, all the staging, and all this work, the transport of the helicopters was delayed by another day, a storm moved in, and the deadline passed, by which NSF thought that it was too risky and too late in the season to still fly helicopters so far out onto the ice sheet. Saturday morning we were told that the season was over.

Drifting snow

Most of our hot water drilling equipment had not been in use for the past two years, so we decided to fire it all up to make sure it still runs. The benefit was a nice hot tub in the middle of the Antarctic ice sheet.

Communal hot tub

An LC-130 (here on a take-off attempt) came and got most of the people out. But we managed to secure some Twin Otter support, to put out a network of seismic and GPS stations.
The flight to the ice shelf was spectacular. PIG is one of the fastest flowing glaciers in Antarctica (about 4 km/year). The fast flowing part is separated from the slower moving ice by a shear zone, where the ice is jumbled up into huge towers of ice that looks like it's been put through a grinder.

The shear zone

The shear zone is a distinct, several kilometers wide, zone, that extends all the way to the ocen (in the far distance in the picture below)

Pine Island Glacier shear zone

We enjoyed two days of phenomenal weather during which we installed five on-ice stations that will now collect GPS and seismic data for the next year. This involved a lot of skillful flying, expertly done by our Kenn Borek crew.

Sun bathing on a Twin Otter

GPS and seismic station on PIG ice shelf

Twin Otter with seismic and GPS station

Now we're back in McMurdo, waiting to go home. We are already full of ideas on what to do better next year to avoid another month of sitting and waiting. Stay tuned...