Going to Graduate School on Alaska Glaciers

A move to a new office at the Geophysical Institute has given me the opportunity to observe a species I had not seen before--young scientists. To enter my office, I pick my way through partitions of graduate students who study glaciers. On the journey, I dodge bags of food, drying tents, the jaws of ice crampons, and the occasional sled dog puppy. If I didn't know what these guys studied, I could probably guess from their tans. If that wasn't enough of a clue, I recently counted the pictures of glaciers on the path to my office. There are 44.

These guys enjoy immensely what they do, and they do research. Before I worked here, I held what I suspect is the popular view of scientists--the nerdish types who always excelled in the math classes but weren't very active outside the classroom. These guys don't fit the stereotype.

Grad student Martin Truffer has more than a dozen snow-related photos in his cubicle. Truffer, 30, is from Switzerland. He came to the Geophysical Institute for his doctorate degree because Alaska has more glaciers than Switzerland, and because his present advisors, Geophysical Institute professors Will Harrison and Keith Echelmeyer, had a good reputation in Switzerland.

Last summer, Truffer spent a good chunk of time on Black Rapids Glacier. He helped Harrison and Echelmeyer run a hot water drill with which they melted holes up to 600 meters deep into the glacier. They used the holes to check out the interaction between the glacier and the soils underneath. They gathered data that will help glaciologists find out why this and other glaciers tend to surge. From 1936 to 1937, Black Rapids advanced four miles in four months to earn its nickname, the "Galloping Glacier." Other glaciers don't surge.

For two months last summer, Truffer was living in a tent on ice in the middle of the Alaska Range. He skied and snowmachined to work. When he needed a bath, he crawled into the "hot tub," the warm-water storage pen for the drill. When the hot tub was too hot, he shoveled snow into the water. After two months living on a glacier, Truffer was flown back to Fairbanks on a day that didn't remind him of ice.

"It was the hottest day of the summer," Truffer said. "When I got out of the plane I still had my skiing pants on."

Dan Elsberg, from Maryland, studied engineering physics in Ithaca, New York. Being an outdoorsy type of guy, he realized he didn't want a career that would have him spend 40 hours a week sitting in a basement trying to develop a faster computer chip. While on a spring break visit to Alaska, Elsberg, 24, took a flight-seeing tour of Denali. An aerial view of Ruth Glacier fired a light bulb in his head. Here, he could study physics and be outside at the same time.

Working with Harrison and Echelmeyer, Elsberg has traveled to three glaciers this summer--Gulkana, in the Alaska Range; Wolverine, on the Kenai Peninsula; and McCall, in the Brooks Range. Out for about a week on each glacier, Elsberg uses a steam drill, a much smaller version of the hot water drill that resembles a pressure cooker, for mass-balance studies. He drills narrow holes about 10 meters deep in glaciers and inserts a metal pole. By checking how much of the pole is covered or exposed in the future, glaciologists can tell if the glacier is gaining or losing ice. By measuring the poles' locations with a global positioning system, researchers can also tell how fast a glacier is moving. Elsberg's duties have not all been directly work-related, such as the time he and Echelmeyer spent six hours stomping out an aircraft runway with skis because soft snow made a takeoff from McCall Glacier impossible. Tough work, but to Elsberg it beats entering and analyzing data on a computer, a task that probably takes up the majority of a graduate student's hours.

The third graduate student who clogs the path to my office, Shad O' Neel, couldn't be reached for an interview. He was skiing on Mendenhall Glacier in Juneau at the time, gathering data for his master's degree. That sounds pretty good to me: working on your mind and your tan at the same time.