data starts to come in Options

[Robert_Oddo]

We were back up to the glacier today to measure ablation, while other teams were coring and others were measuring river discharge. It was foggy, cold and in the mid thirties. We are collecting a lot of data now and we are starting to look at how this years data differs from last years. We are trying to get a handle on yearly changes in this glacial system and how sediment cores reflect this. The climate varies from year to year and to distinquish this variation from a trend towards some bigger change is a hard thing to do. As you can see in the table below, the amount of ice that melts on a daily basis is huge. Between 3 and 7 cm a day. All this water goes daily into the river below the glacier carrying sediment. The sediment gets deposited in layers in the lake eventually. The more water, the more sediment, the thicker the core. It takes years of study of systems such as this one to see if the change observed is just part of a normal yearly variation or more part of a trend. That's why it is important to get a handle on how the sediment layers are being formed. This will allow us to understand how these systems varied in the past and perhaps make some predictions of what might happen in the future.. Below I put some diagrams that you might find interesting!!


comparison of ablation for certain dates this year as compared to last year


another way of looking at the data over an aerial photo


boundaries of the glacier since 1961. There seems to be a trend here!!!


camera that will take pictures of the glacier every day over a 10 day period to monitor local changes in weather


camera set up on a rock cairn