.: ACT10-A Nearing Completion

Saturday, May 1, 2010

ACT10-A Nearing Completion

With practically "fleece jacket" weather on the ice sheet today, the team has completed 38 meters of their 50-meter core. I'm assuming "fleece jacket" weather is relative to what they've experienced thus far, as Evan reports to be wearing a down jacket over his fleece jacket and his balaclava. The team hopes to make it to ACT10-C by tomorrow, which is their last coring site. If good weather persists, they will complete their primary-science goals - three 50-meter cores in the data-void zone coupled with GPR. Our fingers are crossed for the ACT10 team!

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Arctic Circle Traverse 2011

Recent atmospheric model results have indicated that the southeast portion of the Greenland Ice Sheet receives nearly 5 times more snow than the ice-sheet-wide mean. This would suggest that an additional 90 billion tons of ice must be added to the Greenland Ice Sheet mass budget. However, such high snowfall rates have never been observed in Greenland before. Thus it is important to confirm that these high accumulation peaks actually do exist. This is the goal of the Arctic Circle Traverse. In 2010, we drilled three cores in the southeast down to an elevation of 1725m and found accumulation rates of 1.8 m w.eq. (more snow than Alta!). In 2011 we plan to drill 4 more cores, and collect more than 300 km of radar profiles. We depart for Greenland on March 28th. Updates on the traverse will be kept on this blog as well as http://bprc.osu.edu/wiki/ACT. This year, we have arranged a real-time GPS satellite uplink that will map our position and other information every minute. The link to the mapping site is: http://www.datatransport.org/act/monitor Thanks for following and wish us luck!

Saturday, May 1, 2010