Return to summer

I sometimes think that glaciologists - especially those who chose to live in Fairbanks - must be really stupid people. I spend my winter in the dark and cold, and once spring arrives I travel to Greenland so that I can sit next to a giant ice cube all summer... Well, that's not to say that I didn't enjoy being in Greenland, because I did. But its also really nice to be back in Fairbanks. Everything seems so green, and its warm and the flowers are blooming and the birds are chirping.

I've started keeping a journal while doing field work because after a while the days blur together. I'll try to type up some of my entries and post them here. Maybe they're interesting?

For now, I'll leave you with a link to a video that I put together. About once a week we witnessed a BACE (bad ass calving event), during which a large part of the glacier tongue would break off and roll around in the fjord, making a lot of noise in the process. The icebergs are huge- the ice cliff that you'll see in the video is 80-100 m high, meaning that the ice is on the order of 800 m thick. Try picturing that rolling around in your neighborhood! This particular calving events lasted for about 20 minutes; I took one frame every 10 seconds and compressed the whole sequence into about 20 seconds.

For an avi file, click here. For a wmv file, click here. Sorry if they don't work on your machine.