Juneau Icefield Research Program

I spent the summers of 1999 and 2000 on the Juneau Icefield, Alaska. The Juneau Icefield Research Program has been in existence since 1946 under the direction of Maynard Miller. The program has a long-term, detailed record of the changes in a representative alpine glacier system. This record is an important part of global change research with implications for scientists' view of the human impact on the natural world and consequential policy decisions. Some of the components of the record are: velocity surveys (The Crevasse Zone), mass balance studies, seismic profiles, detailed meteorology, moraine dating, and recently Synthetic Aperture Radar snow roughness and wetness measurements. The program combines this research with rigorous background education for undergraduate, graduate, and a few high school students. The students receive safety training and introductory lectures in Juneau before departing for a series of remote field stations set up in a North-South transect across the Icefield. The camps are run and maintained by a great set of staff people (e.g. A Different Perspective). After moving through the four main camps on the icefield, students have observed many of the facets of the field of glaciology. The program wraps up in Atlin, BC with a presentation of the season's results to the community. One of the best aspects of the program is the direct connection between the classroom and the natural world. Visiting professors from around the world lecture on topics relevant to the world on the doorstep of the lecture room.

I finally posted some more color pictures. And now I have finally finished the captions too. I decided to keep all the pictures on one page instead of splitting it into multiple pages like my Antarctica pages. So you'll find the pictures from 1999 below; the pictures from 2000 are farther down the page (starting with a yellowish vertical sunset shot). In 2000 I took some black and white film which was kind of fun - a different perspective. So many of the colors on the ice come in the white/blue/black spectrum that it changed the way I took pictures less than if I had been in a more colorful landscape. I developed a few of my own enlargements from the black and white negatives.

I also put up a seperate page focusing on a few supraglacial stream pictures.