Together with a team of scientists, University of Alaska's Matt Nolan has been spending the past 6 weeks on Alaska's McCall Glacier, extracting ice cores and installing thermistor string. And he's been blogging it, using some very innovative multimedia tools to bring home what life on the glacier is like.

The main blogging challenge has been getting his posts, photos and videos from the glacier to your browser. Connections to the outside world are very sparse, so the first batch of blog posts and content, from April 22 to May 11, have only just now been delivered to www.IPY.org, via USB thumb drive flown back to civilization.

The wait has been worth it:



That's a 360-degree panorama photo taken for the April 30 post, from above the glacier. (Click on the panorama and drag to look around, press Shift to zoom in, Command (Mac) or Control (PC) to zoom out.)

There are several more such panorama shots; one in the May 4 post showing the drill equipment in action, and one in the May 10 post showing a weather station being repaired.

All posts have great "conventional" photos as well, but some posts also show us video of life on the glaciers. From the post on April 27, see what a storm feels like from both outside and inside a tent; from the May 8 post, watch a race between a snowmobile and a skier:



There's plenty more to explore in these posts. They've been backdated, but only recently added, so make sure to explore them. You can access them all from Matt Nolan's contributor page. (Make sure to increase the items displayed per page to see all the posts).