The day started at the Clothing Distribution Center, but that was a bunch of admin talks and clothing issue. Boring stuff mostly, but necessary.
Most of the rest of the day was spent exploring the city a little bit more. The parts of the city that were either minimally damaged by the earthquake or have already been restored are very nice. It’s a clean city and the people are super friendly. The city is mostly pretty quiet, which is definitely my speed.
View from outside our hotel’s front entrance in Christchurch
Even in the places where the city hasn’t been fully restored, residents are doing whatever they can to make the best of the situation. We found murals throughout the city on the sides of abandoned buildings.
Paintings like this are found all over the place in the city, trying to make the best of an unfortunate situation.
We took a walk through some of the gardens too, and the vegetation is fascinating. The big surprise for me, though, was the sighting of giant sequoia trees! I was not expecting to see them here. I still can’t get over how freakin’ big these things are. They’re obviously better at growing them outside of California than me.
Giant Sequioa in the Christchurch Botanic Garden
Overall I really like Christchurch, but in some ways, it was still just a city. I’m glad I got to explore a little bit but I’m really looking forward to seeing outside the city after the work is done. I mostly expect it to look something like this:
Anyways, we have an early start tomorrow for our flight to the ice. Wish me luck, hopefully we don’t run into any weather delays. Next time I write should be from Antarctica!
Well it’s Saturday night and I have finally arrived in New Zealand. It only took a four and a half hour flight from Boston to Dallas, a five hour layover in Dallas, a 17 hour flight from Dallas to Sydney, a three hour layover in Sydney, and finally a two and a half hour flight from Sydney to Christchurch. For those counting, that’s 32 hours plus a crossing of the international dateline. The journey was worth it though, because when we broke through the clouds on our descent into Christchurch, we were treated to this view out the window:
View of the Southern Alps from my flight into Christchurch, NZ
For those who may not be aware, New Zealand is where the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies were filmed. It’s a beautiful country and I can’t WAIT to explore it, but that will have to wait until after we finish the work at our final destination.
Of course after we got to the hotel we had to explore the city a little bit. A bunch of gardens and parks are located throughout the city, including the Avon River that meanders its way through downtown.
View of Avon River from a bridge in downtown Christchurch, NZ
Sadly a series of earthquakes from 2010-2012 devastated much of the city, so several parts of downtown are still a work in progress. The Christchurch Cathedral, for example, was an iconic landmark in the heart of downtown but now faces one heck of a makeover before returning to its pre-earthquake form.
Christchurch Cathedral in the heart of Christchurch, NZ
I plan to explore a bunch more of the city tomorrow afternoon. We don’t head to the ice until Monday, so after picking up our extreme cold weather gear tomorrow morning we have the rest of the day to ourselves. I’ll update again tomorrow after we explore more of the city.
Two weeks from today I leave on my first research-related travel as a part of the Magnetosphere-Ionosphere Research Lab (MIRL). For those who haven’t heard, I’m going to Antarctica! I’ll be gone for about 5 weeks to help install some scientific equipment at various locations on the Antarctic continent.
What kind of equipment, you ask?
The group I’m going with will be installing a few different kinds of magnetometers, sensors that measure changes in Earth’s magnetic field. Different kinds of magnetometers measure different frequencies of variations in the magnetic field. Our lab is typically interested in Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) or Ultra Low Frequency (ULF) fluctuations (yes, those are real scientific terms!). A few months ago I went to a farm outside of campus to test an ELF system, one of the sensors I’m installing on my upcoming trip. Here’s what it looks like:
ELF magnetometer at Thomson Farm
The long white tube contains the sensor itself. It’s basically a long metal rod with copper wire wrapped around it millions of times. The sensor is really sensitive so we have to get it away from any sort of electrical noise, hence the test at a farm outside of town, far away from the power grid. The spool holds the cable that runs from the main building so we can get the sensor as far away as possible from noisy electrical signals.
Trying to get as far away from civilization as possible in the middle of New England.
In the Antarctic installation this will stretch several hundred feet away from the building where the electronics are housed. The electronics for the ELF system look something like this:
ELF electronics that will be installed at McMurdo Station, Antarctica
This box takes the information from the magnetometer and turns it into useful bits and bytes that a computer can then save in a format we can read. Once we were sure the system was functioning properly, we boxed it up and shipped it down to the ice, where it will be waiting for me upon arrival.
What are we measuring all this for? I’ll let Jon Stewart help me illustrate:
The last day of the glacier course was spent on a cruise out of Whittier, AK into Prince William Sound. The cruise promised we’d see 26 glaciers in one day, but I’ll spare you more pictures of ice 🙂 Instead, I’d like to happily announce that our whale-watching luck has turned for the better. We saw whales for the second time in a row!
Humpback whale lunge feeding in Prince William Sound
This humpback was lunge feeding, which is how you usually get the shots of the whale’s head coming out of the water. This guy was too close to the shore to clear the water so all we got was some fin, but it’s still spectacular watching these huge animals move in the water.
After the glacier course we headed up north from Anchorage to Denali National Park where Mt McKinley is located. We stayed in a cabin near the park entrance that had an awesome view, despite the fact that it rained almost the entire time we were there. Our view for most of the time looked something like this:
The view from our cabin’s front door near Denali National Park
There are more mountains hiding in the background, but I felt this was a pretty accurate representation of the weather while were there. Still awesome, though. For our only full day at the park we got up super early for an all day bus tour since you can only access most of the park roads by bus. It’s amazing how easy it was to get up early when the sun basically never sets! From the bus we saw all kinds of cool wildlife, including several moose, Dall sheep, golden eagles, and caribou. We even saw a female grizzly and her two cubs.
Brown bears in Denali Nat’l Park
We got just past halfway to the end of the 92 mile park road when we were informed that the road had been washed out further along and we’d have to turn back. It was definitely a bummer but the trip was still worth it. There were plenty of mountains visible along the ride which made for spectacular views, but we didn’t get to see the big one. We had been told even before starting that only 30% of visitors ever get to see Mt McKinley due to poor visibility, so getting cut short before reaching that viewpoint wasn’t a total disappointment. Since we got cut short on the bus tour we had to go exploring for wildlife in what little bit of the park we could access on our own. In a chance on our last drive out of the park we met this guy:
Young bull moose in Denali Nat’l Park
I like to think he was saying goodbye and apologizing for the cloudy weather. The next day we drove back to Anchorage where it was of course sunny and beautiful out, but I suppose that’s just the way the weather goes in Alaska.
The next main attraction of the trip was the hike on Matanuska glacier, another terrestrial glacier east of Anchorage. Along the way we stopped for lunch at a place that grilled freshly-caught Alaskan salmon for us out on the back lawn. The place also conveniently had this fantastic view of the valley and the glacier itself.
The view of Matanuska Glacier from our lunch cookout.
When a glacier stops moving it continues to melt under the sun but it doesn’t get any fresh ice to replenish the white surface. That means all the mud and rocks that were previously inside the glacier pile up on top of the glacier, leaving behind what looks like a muddy field. It mostly looks pretty gross, but in this case enough mud has accumulated for long enough that a young forest has begun to grow on top of the glacier. The closest section of trees in the picture below is growing on top of the ice, which scientists first noticed when trees collapsed on top of a melting section of ice!
VIew from the terminus of Matanuska Glacier of the mud and forest on top of the ice.
I really couldn’t even tell that the mud we were walking on was only a thin layer on top of the ice. When we dug down an inch or two through the mud, though, we found nothing but solid ice. Here is a great example that, if you look closely, shows rocks suspended in the ice.
A close up view of ice revealed under the mud on Matanuska Glacier.
The most interesting stuff, though, was the active part of the glacier. We hiked across the mud to the ice and up a ways until we came to a small lake that has formed from melting ice in the middle of the glacier. To get a sense for how big the ice forms are, there is a climber on the left side of the picture climbing the face of the ice (again you might have to click on the image to enlarge in order to see the climber).
View of the small lake that has formed in the middle of Matanuska Glacier.
The big muddy object in the foreground of this picture is one of the really cool features found on glaciers. Rocks that are propped up like this are called table rocks and can be found all over the surface of active glaciers. As the surface of glaciers melt, they leave behind all the rocks and mud contained within. As the rocks and mud are first exposed to direct sunlight, however, the ice underneath the objects are hidden from the sun and therefore can’t melt as fast as the ice around them, so the objects are propped up on these little mounds of ice.
All the mud and rocks wasn’t what I had pictured when I first imagined hiking on a glacier. The ice is what makes glaciers so visually stunning. In lots of place we found this really vibrantly colored blue ice.
Glacier ice melts and re-freezes in bubble-free ice that has this blue hue.
Some of the ice in a glacier melts and refreezes, and when this happens all the bubbles are squeezed out of the ice. This denser, bubble-free ice scatters the light differently, giving the ice a beautiful blue hue. Here we saw a couple layers of the blue ice but one of the layers is partially covered in dirt and rocks.
There was a ton more we saw just on this day, but these were some of the main highlights. This was probably the best part of the trip for me, when else will I get to walk on a glacier!?
To get started with my blog, what better way to kick things off than with our trip to Alaska. After only a few days we have seen some incredible sights. The wildlife has been pretty spectacular, and that includes our first whale sighting (!!!) and my first glimpse of a moose (at 65 mph on the highway, but it still counts). The main attraction of this trip, though, has been the glaciers.
Our first close up was at Aialik Glacier in the Kenai Fjords National Park. The glacier is about a mile wide and over 20 miles long, stretching up into the Harding Ice Sheet. For reference, the speck at the bottom right of the glacier is a 95 foot cruise boat (you’ll probably need to click on the image to enlarge in order to see the boat)!
Aialik Glacier in Kenai Fjords National Park. As the nice gentleman sharing a table with us on the cruise ship remarked, “that [chills] a lot of high balls!”This glacier is a tidewater glacier, which means the glacier terminates at the ocean. These glaciers are overall relatively stable and less sensitive to climate change than others. These glaciers are really interesting to see because they primarily lose ice mass by calving, which is the technical term for a big hunk of ice breaking off and falling into the ocean. Hearing the ice calve sounds like thunder rolling and requires you keep a good distance from the edge.
Next up was Portage Glacier, east of Anchorage. This is a terrestrial glacier that comes down out of the mountains but doesn’t terminate at the ocean. This is very accessible by boat or by hiking. This glacier has been studied by scientists for well over 100 years.
View of Portage Glacier from site of current visitor center, 1958 (NOAA)
This glacier has been retreating back up into the mountains for over 100 years, leaving Portage Lake in its wake. Even just 50 years ago the lake was little more than just a puddle. Now the lake is 600 feet deep at the center! Today, a photo from a similar vantage point looks like this.
View from Portage Lake from visitor center, June 2014
The current edge of the glacier today has receded back behind the dark mountain on the right, not even in sight from the 2014 photo of Portage Lake above. The ice you seen in the mountains of the Portage Lake photo is actually Burns Glacier, and Portage Glacier is around behind the large mountain on the right of the photo. An up close photo of Portage Glacier looks almost like a tidewater glacier.
Portage Glacier, June 2014
As you can see, the glacier is right up next to the water, so some calving occurs like it does in tidewater glaciers. The dark spot in the middle of the glacier is the shore of the lake, though, which means the glacier has almost receded out of the lake. At the terminus the glacier is about a half mile wide and towers a couple hundred feet over the water.
![Aialik Glacier in Kenai Fjords National Park. As the nice gentleman sharing a table with us on the cruise ship remarked, "that [chills] a lot of high balls!"](https://spacewx.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/aialikglacier.jpg)
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