Other people talk about ice!

I’ve been trying to do more with this blog than just write text and post it—WordPress offers a wide variety of features, and blogging is at its best when it’s part of a larger ecosystem rather than just one person talking in isolation. So I’ve been adding links to the blogroll. Allow me to present a few here:

From a Glacier’s Perspective offers detailed descriptions of glacier retreat around the world, with each post focusing on a different glacier. This post describes how a glacial feature called ogives can be used to help measure glacier velocity. (Ogives are “ripples” in the glacier that form due to the influence of icefalls: the area of ice that happens to be going over the icefall during the summer melt season melts faster than the ice around it, leaving a trough that then moves down the glacier.)

The IceBridge Blog recounts news from NASA’s IceBridge Campaign. The aerial surveys of IceBridge use a variety of instruments–lasers, radar, even a gravimeter–to survey the Earth’s ice. The information gathered from IceBridge will “bridge” the gap between IceSAT-1, which stopped taking data in 2009, and IceSAT-2, which is scheduled for launch in 2016. The blog includes both pretty pictures of icy landscapes and discussions of the science behind the work, such as this post on how airborne gravimetry can tell us about the shape of the land below water and ice.

For those of you wanting to see more of Antarctica (one of my favorite continents!) there’s the “Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica (LIMA)” which allows you to pan and zoom all over the continent. Anthony Powell’s photography shows the place on a slightly more intimate scale, mostly around McMurdo and including some justly famed timelapse films. Or Maria Coryell-Martin’s Expeditionary Art captures both the Antarctic and the Arctic, capturing the feel of the icy realms in a way photographs sometimes can’t.

I’ll be adding more as time goes along! In particular, I want to find some good resources on ice elsewhere in the solar system, which is a fascinating subject I haven’t even gone into yet.

Old Ice and New Media

I’ve just enrolled in a Science Communication class, which will teach me new techniques for explaining Science and getting people excited about it (techniques like not allowing your blog to fall into month-long hiatuses, for example.) Apparently a Twitter account is part of that. I’m @squidonice on Twitter; soon I may even have more than one tweet. Stay tuned!

Disruptions

I am far behind on transcribing posts; I’ve been traveling around New Zealand, so Web access has been difficult to get.

Most of you have probably heard about the major quake that struck Christchurch on Tuesday. I was well away from it at the time, but since Christchurch is the “gateway to the Antarctic”, quite a few people from the US Antarctic Program were there when the quake struck. Most of them have been accounted for and are alive and well, although many of them have been left with nothing but the clothes on their backs, and several have hair-raising escape stories, including one person who apparently had to dig himself out of the wreckage of his hotel room and another who rappelled down the side of a building on bedsheets. The USAP personnel in Christchurch have been exceptionally helpful, starting up a makeshift refugee camp in the Clothing Distribution Center and adjoining flight terminal.

Meanwhile, down at McMurdo, the sea ice has broken out of the sound for the first time in a decade and a half (not because of the quake, it’s just coincidental.) Probably as a result, pieces of the ice shelf are breaking off. This may prove problematic, as the ice shelf is where the planes land to take people to and from the station. Right now the station staff are hurrying to move the road so that they’ll still be able to access the runway, in hopes that the summer crew still on station won’t be obligated to winter over.

So it’s exciting times at the USAP. Everyone’s thoughts are with the quake victims, of course, and with Christchurch as it struggles to rebuild.

I’m about to leave for a four-day hike, but I’ll be back in touch when I return.