MAGIC-DML

In case you missed it: This past week, our very own Sarah Sams was the official #guestgrammer on the American Geophysical Union Instagram page. Check out some of her posts below, or head over to the AGU page itself! Monday: Hey there, AGU! I’m Sarah Sams (@sarahesams), and I’ll be taking over as a #guestgrammer for the next five days. I am a graduate student at Purdue University (@lifeatpurdue) under Dr. Nat Lifton and a member of the @magicdml research team. MAGIC-DML is an

Going up to Høgskavlen. Photo: Håkan Grudd Yesterday we drove our snowmobiles up to the Høgskavlen Mountain, 2 256 m above sea level, and 850 meters higher than the location of our camp. Høgskavlen is a glacier-covered plateau lined with small mountain ridges. The way up (and down) went over rolling glaciers and past blueish icefalls. At the top it was completely windless and not a cloud in sight! We had a fantastic view north towards the Borg Massif, and to the west we could

In our last article, we began explaining how remote sensing helps us with our mapping, the first “M” of our acronym. We use this to begin to create geomorphological maps (maps that show the landscape features on the Earth’s surface produced by geological processes). The next strategy we use is field mapping and verification. --- Not all the mapping of ice and rock surface features we need can be done through our satellites. Some of it needs to be done hands on “in the field”

With a few days of good weather the team had a very productive time at one of our most northerly field sites, Straumsnutane. This site is on the west side of an ice stream (a “river” of much faster flowing ice that drains ice from this part of the ice sheet), and so we want to see how the ice sheet level has changed in this dynamic area. The picture shows the ice stream from the air – the cracks are crevasses that open up because of tension (pulling apart) in the ice as it mo

We had our best day yet for collecting samples and seeing evidence of past, higher levels of the east Antarctic Ice Sheet. We returned to Grunehogna, a nunatak that we had visited a few days ago for reconnaissance work. We found good evidence that the ice sheet had formerly been much thicker and covering much of this nunatak. The evidence included glacial striations (elongate scratches on bedrock surfaces, made when rocks at the base of the ice are dragged over the underlying

New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day were productive fieldwork days for the MAGIC-DML field team. Poor weather had been delaying fieldwork, but a couple of good days gave us a window of opportunity. We visited two nunatak sites (nunataks are mountains that protrude from the ice sheet, a bit like an island in a sea of ice). This involves traveling for one to two hours by snowmobile across the ice sheet to the nunataks we want to visit. If the snow on top of the ice is smooth,

Part 1: “An army marches on it’s stomach” the famous quote attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte resonates well beyond the military. Nobody functions well when they are hungry, but this is particularly so when exposed to the unforgiving conditions of Antarctica which our field team work in. The food can truly make or break an expedition. And feeding our small ‘army’ of a field team is far from an easy challenge! The 2016-17 field team enjoying one of Karin’s delicious meals at Was

Learning from our success using both the trucks and snowmobiles to access sites during the fieldwork in Tottanfjella, it was decided to make a speedy return journey to Milorgfjella with the snowmobiles. This would hopefully allow us to visit the high elevation, summit sites we were unable to access during the first visit. In order to fit the snowmobiles and fuel on the trucks, we had to significantly reduce the camping gear and go ‘lightweight’. We were a team of just 5 for t

In our first major expedition from Wasa, we visited Milorgfjella, the northeasternmost nunatak in the Heimefrontfjella (pronounced ‘Hime-a-front-fyella’) range, for evidence of past glacial cover at a range of altitudes above the modern ice surfaces. Unfortunately our Arctic Trucks could not reach higher altitude sites in that area due to deep, dry, sugary snow on steep ground, so we were forced to concentrate on lower altitude samples. After returning to Wasa on 26 January,

When we are out in the field, we are a team of eight people based in a field camp. We have three large Weatherhaven tents; two for sleeping and one that serves as a mess tent for cooking, eating and storing spare food and equipment. We sleep four persons to a tent, using a sleeping system that consists of a folding camp bed (to keep us off the cold snow beneath), a roll-mat and a sleeping bag. On the latest trip out we were camped on the ice sheet at about 1500 metres above s