The last week of April I went on my first field trip to the Black Rapids Glacier in the Alaska Range. It was also my first trip that involved landing on a glacier. It is the largest glacier that I have ever walked on and the longest time I’ve ever spent on ice. It was a lot of ‘firsts’ and it was really awesome.
Here is a map of the Black Rapids from the USGS. Our base camp was near the Confluence of the Loket Tributary with the Black Rapids. This map also shows the location of the terminus after the 1936-1937 surge. During the winter of 1937 it advanced at a rate of almost 1 mile per month!
This was the start of 3 summers of field work for us. We will be studying a tributary’s role in surge initiation. A surge is a sudden increase in a glacier’s speed from ten to hundreds of times its normal speed. It is not currently known what the trigger mechanism for a surge might be, or why some glaciers surge and some don’t. We spent the week setting up gps stations on both the main glacier and the Loket tributary (the largest tributary to the glacier) to study the dynamics between them, time-lapse cameras to watch for lake drainage, and took some measurements for mass balance. Martin and Christian also spent about two days dragging a radar back and forth to get some bed depth measurements as well.
What follows is a lot of pictures from the trip. Hopefully it doesn’t take too long to load, I didn’t want to leave much out. Continue reading
