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.[…]
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[…]
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[…]
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[…]
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[…]
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[…]
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[…]
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[…]
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[…]
The RESPONDER team has published new findings in the journal Nature Communications. We used a combination of 3D computer modelling and real-world observations to show the previously unknown, yet profound dynamic consequences tied to a growing number of lakes forming on the Greenland ice sheet. Every summer, lakes form on the surface of the Greenland[…]