October 20, 2019
Postcards from a frozen icebreaker – Part 5
These are 700-kg beasts! I can’t really believe we are sticking these on the ice, so they will be going on stable, thick-ridged areas. Fortunately we can brute force them around a bit, as they are installed on top of 3 snowboards…
October 19, 2019
Postcards from a frozen icebreaker – Part 4
There, off to starboard, are the flags we put down by the gateway to the Fortress. Flying by quickly! Hit the brakes! We barreled into the floe, just south of the gateway, eventually coming to a stop on a thick chunk of ice…..
October 18, 2019
Postcards from a frozen icebreaker – Part 3
A long day on the ice, but these days are so important for the floe selection process. Exhausted. Fully. We arrived at a potential candidate floe….
October 17, 2019
Simulating varying rock strength to create an interesting model anticline
From The Geo Model: Modeling the Aguaragüe Anticline, a structure in the sub-Andes fold-thrust belt in northwest Argentina.
Postcards from a frozen icebreaker – Part 2
Today we explored a very big floe, probably the biggest spatially in the whole region. Could this be our home for the next year? Extensive coverage of what look like frozen over melt ponds. Many measurements of 30-50 cm ice. This is not what we came to the central Arctic to find…
October 16, 2019
Postcards from a frozen icebreaker – Part 1
A day at sea now. Tired. Perhaps it is part of getting my sea legs, and perhaps it is part due to sleeping 9 hours last night. First long sleep in a long time. Turned in early after our launch. No socializing. Feeling a bit melancholy. I think I haven’t yet processed the concept of being away for so long, not having normal life, family, other people…… just so much work for such a long time that I never processed it. And now feeling a bit of loss. All of this hard work for more than 10 years and now that whole part of my life is done. No more preparation for MOSAiC; now we are doing MOSAiC.
October 11, 2019
Searching for the deepest gorge in the Appalachian Mountains
The question of the deepest gorge east of the Mississippi River came from a reader of the “biggest mountains” post. I think it’s a really good question because it addresses another landscape superlative (deepest, tallest, oldest, etc.) that is claimed by several locations in the Appalachians.
Middle Alaska once again part of the cryosphere
The great albedo change of 2019 might be here. Snow is covering this part of Alaska that gets coldest in winter and warmest in summer, driving it toward the former.
October 8, 2019
An interesting geothermal energy prospect in the Vienna Basin…and its connection to oil and gas
In effect, the hydrogeothermal project is doing just what oil and gas exploration does–looking for and extracting desirable fluids in the subsurface. In this case, the desirable fluid is hot and readily flowing water…
October 7, 2019
Sifting volcanic paydirt to help forecast eruptions
More than 100 volcanoes pimple the adolescent skin of Alaska, spreading from ear to ear. Some are loud, flamboyant and obnoxious. Others are sneaky and quiet, escaping notice until a pilot sees a gray plume that wasn’t there yesterday.
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