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[…]
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[…]
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[…]
Flying drones was one of the main scientific activities we undertook in the field season last summer. We were using them to gather data on the calving front and on the ice surface farther inland, with the objective of tracking small changes in surface elevation caused by hydrological variations at the base of the glacier.[…]
Hello! To give you an insight into the fieldwork process, I’ll be publishing a few extracts on here from the diary I wrote whilst on the Summer 2017 fieldwork season. Here’s the first one about our first day at the tundra site and the travails of setting up camp. Samuel Setting Up Camp Today was[…]