Mt. Waddington
Shortly after returning from Hercules Dome, I was lucky to have an opportunity to contribute to a project drilling a new core on Mt. Waddington in British Columbia. This was a relatively “local” project - a mere 12-hour drive (including an hour or two on dirt) from Seattle followed by a short helicopter flight. The goal of the project was to drill one of the southernmost ice cores in North America, providing a couple-hundred year record of climate evolution including events like heat waves (and so glacier melt events), snowfall, and wildfire.
The project was quite challenging. Daytime temperatures were well above freezing, and the glacier itself was quite warm (O°C almost everywehre). This neccessitated a thermal rather than mechanical drill system, built by the US Ice Drilling Program. We did our best to keep cores in a sub-surface trench, and flew them off the glacier via helicopter to a freezer trailer waiting at the helipad below.
My personal contribution to the project included both working as an ice core handler, but also running the geophyscial measurements for the summer. I deployed both ApRES phase-sensitive radar and VHF ground-penatrating radar to continue a long-term project to constrain changes to the glacier ove rtime.
There’s been some fantstic media coverage about this project. If you’re interested, check out this article from a Canadian outlet.