A bit behind on the posts, but day 2 of fieldwork at Borebreen went well.
After a successful first day scoping out the field site, we started deploying seismometers on the ice surface. Pretty tricky at first as the surface of Borebreen was heavily crevassed. We expected this though – the glacier is surging, which means it is flowing much faster than it was a few years ago. As it flows fast, it stretches and the ice surface fractures creating massive crevasses like this:
Seismometer deployment is fun – we drill a hole into the ice and leave the seismometer inside the hole. We stick bamboo sticks into the ice so that we can find them later – I’ll let you know in the later field blogs how that goes!
Lot’s of walking, but Borebreen is a spectacular glacier and my favourite place in Svalbard so far. I hope our instruments will start to uncover the secrets of why Borebreen is surging. The seismometers will tell us more about how the ice is sliding at the bed and how much water there is.
Research Page: William D. Harcourt 