Had a great visit to the summit of Mount Washington in NH this week to meet with Observatory staff & discuss science & education efforts we are working on together. Not a bad day for some windy weather as well! Peak gusts hit 86 mph. Check out this worthy organization! 🧪 mountwashington.org

Glaciers store much of Earths freshwater in frozen AND liquid form. Many such as the Juneau Icefield (JIF) store water within its pore spaces year-round. Here is a firn core extracted from the JIF draining water. We are mapping aquifers across the JIF to estimate how much water is stored! 🧪

I made this flubber model in 2008 & still show it all the time to teach about glacier ice flow in a valley & related topics. I’ve used this to talk about basics of glaciers with grade school students up to deriving shear & normal strain rates, & vorticity, with undergrad & grad students! Enjoy! 🧪

PhD Candidate, Steve Bernsen @umaine.bsky.social made this visual of how an impulse from ground-penetrating radar (GPR) generates a waveform that geometrically spreads from the point source, & reflects off of & refracts at geological sub-surface layers that have different electrical properties. 🧪

Happy new years! Today, I’m sharing a video capturing the beauty of supraglacial lakes that form annually on the Juneau Icefield. We were hiking this ridge to find locations to place timelapse cameras & a radar interferometer for capturing lake drainage & possible ice velocity changes or uplift 🧪

Glacier hydrology on the Juneau Icefield! Here I drive along the edge of a crevasse that just a few days prior was flat from one side to the other. I believe a section of this glacier ice was uplifted by subglacial water at the bed! Next year, we hope to drill to the bed to see if a lake is there! 🧪

Rough day on the job, collecting 400 MHz ground-penetrating radar data to study snowpack & firn depth across the Juneau Icefield. Here you can see the real time computer screen showing data being collected as the snowmobile drives about 8-10 km per hour, & the antenna strapped in front of my feet🧪

Weekend break from science! In 2020, I picked up packrafting b/c COVID canceled all my fieldwork. New England has endless packrafting opportunities. Here is one of dozens of beautiful Brook trout streams I’ve paddled down & walked back to my vehicle as a loop. I love Maine!

This day we forgot an extra sled but a jacket worked almost a well to tow a GPR antenna & conduct a wide angle reflection & refraction (WARR) survey for measuring radiowave velocities in snow/firn on the Juneau Icefield.
Here is a nice dissertation about WARR! 🧪 nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/51...

This summer, rock star grad student, Tahi Wiggins, used the Gamma Terrestrial Radar Interferometer on the Juneau Icefield to measure ice movement & try to capture daily onset of surface melt around a bunch of supraglacial lakes. This was her first attempt to set it up on her own & it worked! 🧪

Flashback to last May when Kailey & I were trying to do a final geophysics recon of an ice core drill site in Kluane National Park, Canada, but weather blocked our other two team members & science gear from making it to us. This was a beautiful evening in the mountains though! 🧪

One of my projects is studying how snow properties like density, water content, & depth, change over time. Newt & Nigel built this box for snow, with a track that GPR can be towed across as often as we want, to look at the snow. Now we just need it to snow!🧪

A NASA funded project on the Juneau Icefield is using the Icefield as an analog to Jupiters moon, Europa! Part of the study is to look for microbiology or other signs of life in a subglacial lake & compare that to surface biology. Jared Clance is a rock star grad student doing exactly this! 🧪

This little girl has a heart of gold and she always makes life so much better! I caught her seemingly pause to watch the sunset the other day ❤️

Dr Tate Meehan is a gem of a person, brilliant, & one of very few to have used Multi-Offset GPR to measure snow/firn depth & density. What he doesn’t say is we are ALSO trying to use info from the system with other data to estimate water content in the wet snow of the Juneau Icefield. Thanks Tate! 🧪