RESPONDER
Resolving subglacial properties, hydrological networks and dynamic evolution of ice flow on the Greenland Ice Sheet
GPS & Met Stations
UAVs
Passive Seismology
ApRES
3D Modelling
Boreholes
Fibre Optics
The Team
POUL CHRISTOFFERSEN
BRYN HUBBARD
MARION BOUGAMONT
SAM DOYLE
Charlie Schoonman
TOM CHUDLEY
Samuel Cook
ROB LAW
News and Blogs
Fantastic fibre-optics! New technology unlocks Store Glacier
Seismology is one of the standard pieces of the glaciological toolkit. Glaciologists have long known that seismic energy – vibrations travelling through the ice – can be used for actively imaging glacier structure, or for listening out for the natural rumblings as a glacier scrapes across its bed and water drains through networks of channels.[…]
Modelling brings new insights of Store Glacier’s hydrological networks
In a new article published in The Cryosphere, the RESPONDER team reports how a channelised subglacial drainage system evolves and how discharge into Ikerasak Fjord affects melting the Store Glacier’s calving ice front. The team modelled the subglacial drainage network of Store Glacier in the high-surface-melt summer of 2012 and low-surface-melt summer of 2017, as[…]
Lake drainage paper and media coverage
A new paper from the RESPONDER team led by PhD student Tom Chudley has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In it, we present in situ records of a rapidly draining supraglacial lake in a fast-flowing sector of the Greenland Ice Sheet. Despite supraglacial lake drainage influencing ice sheet dynamics[…]
Radar Experiments 2019
Sean Peters, Eliza Dawson, and Mickey MacKie from Stanford University deployed a number of different radar systems on Store Glacier. Sean experimented with passive radar using the Sun as a radio source for bed echo detection. Mickey, Sean, and Eliza tested a bistatic radar system developed by Nicole Bienert and Sean Peters during the 2018[…]
Deploying the Cryoegg
Here’s an update on how Cryoegg performed during the field season. We deployed it in the borehole at Store Glacier, but regrettably it was too large to reach the bed. The borehole is narrowest in the middle of the glacier where the ice is coolest, so this was where it got stuck, roughly 400m below[…]
RIP Geophones
There are many approaches to designing a geophone network on a glacier, but one of the most important controls on data quality is coupling: the better the contact between the ice and the geophone, the higher the quality of the seismograms recorded. However, good coupling usually comes at a price- in this case, the ultimate[…]
Preparing the Cryoegg
I’m excited to be joining the RESPONDER team at Store Glacier next week – I’m Mike Prior-Jones from Cardiff University, and together with my PI Liz Bagshaw, I’ve been developing Cryoegg, a wireless subglacial probe. The plan is to put Cryoegg down a borehole to the bed of the glacier, where it can measure the[…]
First RESPONDER UAV paper published
The first scientific paper resulting from the UAV work package of RESPONDER has been published in The Cryosphere. Led by PhD student Tom Chudley, the paper described how we use carrier-phase GPS and UAVs to produce high-quality 3D models of the Greenland Ice Sheet, without requiring ground control points (GCPs), a common requirement in traditional UAV[…]
The Joy of Fibre Optics
When hooked up to a suitable analyser, fibre-optic cables, much like those used for superfast broadband, can function as very long, very bendy thermometers or strain gauges, which record data at all points along their length. This incredible effect has been exploited for over a decade by oil companies, keen to monitor the temperature throughout[…]
On the importance of a good pair of wellies
Conversations on the ice sheet took on a sort of cyclical quality. If you’re with the same seven people for an entire month, with very little external stimulus, it’s fairly easy to run out of things to say. One strategy to cope with this was reeling out topics to exhaustion, for example discussing blue storage[…]