McCarthy Glaciology Summer School 2010: In Limerick Form

These are some limericks I wrote while attending the 2010 Glaciology Summer School in McCarthy, Alaska. I tried to write one about each subject that was covered in lecture, although I think there are a few missing. N.B.: the tidewater-glacier-as-leveraged-bank analogy is from the actual lecture.

Ice dynamics
Though its speed is exceedingly low,
Ice is fluid, as glacier shapes show.
Non-Newtonian viscosity
Determines velocity
According to Glen’s law of flow.

Ice fabric and anisotropy
At the microscale, ice grain migrations
Derive from crystalline dislocations
Anisotropies cause
New constitutive laws
To account for in our simulations.

Subglacial hydrology
Water flows through the glacier like blood
Makes it slide over bedrock and mud
When a tunnel melts through
Or ice dam breaks in two
Out comes pouring a Biblical flood

Tidewater glaciers
When these tidewater glaciers retreat
The destruction’s both fast and complete
It advances again
On a borrowed moraine
Like a leveraged bank on Wall Street

Mass balance
Adding up rain, wind, heat, cloud and sun
To get melt isn’t very much fun
You could try degree-day
It’s an easier way
But a somewhat less accurate one

Glacial thermodynamics
Now the species of glaciers are three
Cold are fully below zero C
Temperate’s always at freezing
Polythermal’s a pleasing
Combination of types A and B

Remote sensing with ICESat
When inspecting the tracks of ICESat
Look for spots that are curiously flat
Or locations that flex
From concave to convex
It’s a subglacial lake doing that!

Gravitational remote sensing
For the weighing of glaciers, a scale
Is inevitably much too frail
But science saves face
By celestial GRACE
Which delivers the mass-balance Grail

Laser Altimetry
To determine an ice-surface height
Send out regular pulses of light
Measure time to bounce back
Then, repeating your track
Demonstrates warming glaciers’ dire plight

Inverse methods
To extrapolate former conditions
Using presently measured positions
Although methods inverse
May inspire you to curse
They’ll reveal past climatic transitions

Debris-covered glaciers
Grand white Kennicott looms above town
But its foot is all filthy and brown
If we clean off the sand
It’ll look mighty grand
Till, uncovered, it melts, and we drown.

The consequences of setting forty glaciologists loose on a small town’s alcohol supply
There’s a flow law for ice strain and shear
What we need is a flow law for beer
Given glacier grads, N,
And a drink rate X, when
Will all booze on the shelves disappear?

The Ballad of AGU

The American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting (usually just referred to as AGU) is when something like 15,000 scientists descend on San Francisco’s Financial District for a week. There are talks and posters, of course (so many talks and posters!) but as with any convention the main point is to connect with new colleagues and re-connect with old friends. This is a poem I wrote for the Cryosphere gathering at AGU a couple of years ago. The meter and rhyme scheme are modeled after “The Egyptian Diamond” by Randall Garrett.

I will be at AGU again next week! Monday is Science Open Mic Night at Jillian’s Billiards Club, so I have to decide what to perform, which is going to be tricky.

The Ballad of AGU

Sunday, just a bit past five
And you’re feeling half alive
With your poster on your shoulder as you stumble to your flight
You’ve been staying up too late
Your data won’t cooperate
And you found a whole new error around ten PM last night.

But now you’re at AGU
There’s a million things to do
There are friends from far-off places who you haven’t seen all year
In the morning, though, I’m betting
You will find yourself regretting
That moment you decided “Sure, I’ll have another beer!”

Bright and early, you will fight
The grand excesses of last night
You will struggle bravely out of bed and stagger to Moscone
There’s a talk you must attend
By an early-rising friend
And a cutting-edge announcement you suspect might be baloney

Now you’ve coffee cup in hand,
with which to aid your mental band-
width, for a firehose of data’s aimed directly at your brain
There’s a clever new device
To gauge the temperature of ice
And a host of novel ways to watch a glacier from a plane

There’s a brand-new data set
Barely even processed yet
That details the Greenland ice sheet’s elevation, shape and speed
There’s a fellow at a booth
Who, if his pitch has any truth
Sells an instrumental system that does everything you need

There’s an algorithmic way
To take the data from a day
And extrapolate behavior of the system for a week
There’s a dozen gloomy talks
On how the planet’s on the rocks
And the global warming outlook’s gotten just a bit more bleak

Then, before you’re really read
When your spiel is still unsteady
You’re onstage—your poster’s posted and your work you must explain
Visitors interrogate you
Some to praise, some to deflate you
And your voice is going hoarse from giving out the same refrain

But look! some kind soul brought beer
And the end is getting near
And suddenly it’s over, just as quick as it begun
Battling through the teeming streets
You reach a trove of drinks and treats
And the denizens of Cryosphere are here to have some fun!