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
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[…]
Drones v2.0
This year, for the summer 2018 field season, Tom returned to Store Glacier with new and improved UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, or ‘drones’). These new units had larger lithium-ion batteries that provided a longer flight time allowing us to cover a larger area, as well as a slightly improved carrier-phase GPS setup, recording the UAV[…]
Passive Seismology
When I visited a glacier for the first time, I was amazed at how much noise it made. From little creaking noises to ominously deep booms, a day on the glacier is never quiet. To a seismologist, this cacophony is a great source of scientific data- by deploying geophones both on top of and inside[…]