Drilling stopped about 4AM when the core barrel came up dripping wet. Water? Seventy meters down within the accumulation area of an arctic glacier? Is that unusual? I really have no idea, though I was surprised by it. We had expected the ice here to be about 150 m thick, based on radar we had done earlier not too far away. So to hit liquid water only halfway down was a big surprise. We had gone to a night-time drilling schedule because of the problems the sun was creating by getting the core stuck due to melting snow. I say “we” in the royal sense, as it is really Bella, Terry, Darek, and Ryo that are doing all of the coring work. I walk over every once in a while and try to look official, but my time has been mostly occupied by sorting gear, finding tools or solutions t...

Drilling progress slowed substantially with an improvement in the weather, then stopped completely as we focused on staying alive during a storm. The past few days had been overcast, with no direct sun. With the sun out in full force yesterday, snow began melting on the core barrel and then re-freezing again once it was lowered back in the hole where it was colder. This is problematic because when the core barrel gets stuck in the outer section, the core can be damaged when trying to extract it. So we decided to stop work in the early afternoon and start again at 5AM before the sun came up. At dinner time, the wind had picked up a bit, and continued to grow stronger through the evening. By 3AM, it had intensified quite a bit, and I began to be concerned about the integrity of our tents. At...

After years of planning, failures, and considerable efforts, we have finally extracted the first section of our deep ice core from McCall Glacier. Ice cores from glaciers around the world provide the best record of climate over the past 100 to 100,000 years. No other sources of information provide such long-term, high temporal-resolution or accurate information on climate. McCall Glacier sits inside of essentially a black hole of climate information -- there are neither long-term weather station records nor proxy paleo-climate records in this large region of the Arctic. The ice on McCall Glacier is several hundred years old, and in each of those years clues as to what the weather was like that year get trapped within a layer of snow, which then gets buried by the next year’s layer. Over ...

The big day is here and the weather is good – it’s time to live and work on an arctic glacier for the next few months. I gave our pilot Dirk a call at 7AM to let him know that the weather looked fine in Kaktovik, and he confirmed that the weather in Coldfoot, where his airplane is based, looked good too. So we decided to go for it. It’s a little over a two hour flight for Dirk to fly his DeHavilland Beaver from Coldfoot to Kaktovik, which gave us some time for breakfast and shuttling the rest of our gear down to the airport. The airport in Kaktovik is not like those found in most cities. There is no TSA, there are no parking meters, and there’s not even a building to wait around in. It’s just a runway on a gravel spit between the ocean and the mainland, with an old...

Our five month expedition to arctic Alaska began today with our first stop at Kaktovik, Alaska. Kaktovik is a village of about 300 people, mostly native Alaskans, on the coast of the Arctic Ocean. It’s actually located on an island, separated by a small strip of water from the mainland, but in winter it is all frozen so it is essentially connected. Turner “Is there enough room for me in the car?” No one had much sleep lately. ...

In about 48 hours we leave Fairbanks for five months of research on McCall Glacier and its neighbors in the Alaskan Arctic. For the past few months we have been making plans, shipping tons of gear, and looking forward to an exciting field season. As usual with any big project, we have encountered numerous obstacles, delays, set-backs, and triumphs. But the preparations are nearly finished now and we’re ready to face the next set of challenges. All of our field logistics are handled by small fixed wing aircraft, like this Beaver flown by Dirk Nickisch. This photo was taken a few weeks ago when we confi...

An essay has just been published in March issue of the InfoNorth section of the journal "Arctic", published by the Arctic Institute of North America, on the history of research at McCall Glacier, Alaska. McCall Glacier, located in the eastern Brooks Range of northern Alaska, has the longest and most complete history of scientific research of any glacier in the U.S. Arctic. Spanning the period from the International Geophysical Year (IGY) in 1957-58 to the Fourth International Polar Year (IPY) in 2007-08, this research has resulted in perhaps the best record of recent climate change and its impacts in this region of the Arctic. Creation of this record played a major role in the lives ...