Since arriving at UTIG in January, I’ve been continuing to explore how seismology can inform us about glacier behavior. Now, with the summer field season approaching, colleagues and I are preparing to return to Greenland and recover a year’s worth of data on tidewater glacier and fjord interactions.
Planning is now in full swing with colleagues here at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics, as well as the Univ. of Kansas, Univ. of Oregon, Oregon State Univ., and NASA, to return to the coast of western Greenland. Our teams of glaciologists and oceanographers will be in the field from mid-July through mid-August to collect data recorded since July 2013, and reset instruments for another year of remote operation. We all are excited to see how our equipment managed through the harsh winter at 71 degrees N, at the edge of the Greenland Ice Sheet.
The data we collect will help us better understand some of the intricacies of glacier response to changing climate, and project how Greenland’s glaciers may continue to change in the face of ongoing climate change.