Fifty Years of Glacier-Climate Research on McCall Glacier, Arctic Alaska
The 4th International Polar Year marked 50 years of research on McCall Glacier, as well as perhaps the most ambitious and successful field there to date.
Here's an overview of our IPY4 accomplishments:
We extracted ice cores from 3 holes on McCall Glacier, to depths of 150m, 203m, and 135m and brought about 170m of this ice back to civilization. After processing it, we discovered we have a great paleoclimate and atmospheric pollution record of the past 250 years at annual resolution.
We installed thermistor strings into each of these 3 holes to measure ice temperature of this polythermal glacier and found such surprising results as the climate warms, arctic valley glaciers are getting colder through two independent mechanisms, and get colder with lower elevations.
We created new topographic maps of about 80% of the arctic glaciers in the US with airborne remote sensing, including five separate maps of McCall Glacier itself, which informed us that all of the glaciers here are losing volume at an accelerating rate.
In addition to these major items, we continued our process studies on McCall Glacier, including maintaining the mass balance record, measuring ice velocities, numerical flow modeling, studying processes of internal ice accumulation, maintaining the most comprehensive weather station network on an Alaskan glacier, and beginning a stream hydrology program in cooperation with US Fish and Wildlife agency to understand the impacts of climate change on aquatic ecosystems.
We created over a dozen gigapixel panoramas of 50–100 year repeat photos of glaciers in the US Arctic, as well as hundreds of lower resolution spherical panoramas (eg., see http://www.uaf.edu/water/faculty/nolan/drmatt_photography.htm). These images provide a high-resolution record of the state of the Arctic during this IPY which others can use for comparison of future change and are now finding their way into various museum exhibits.
We maintained an extensive blog of our five months of field activity which may give both other scientists and the public a good idea of what we do in the field and why, through text, photos, videos and interactive panoramas. It's perhaps the most comprehensive polar field blog created as part of IPY4.
The long history of research on the glacier, combined with major pulses of activity like these, give us a unique look at not only the impacts of climate change, but the climate change itself in this huge, data-poor region.
