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[…]

Cryoegg before the attempted deployment in the borehole

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[…]

Liz fills Cryoegg with rubber potting compound

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[…]

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[…]