carrying out a repeat Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) survey of the glacier
Author Archives: Kirk
Siggraph paper shows Briksdalsbreen timelapse
A 2015 paper by University of Washington and Google used Briks’ as an example where mass observation via Flikr could be used to create long term timelapses. See their video on youtube.
There’s a lot of energy in a glacial outflow river!
The outflow river bed remained almost unchanged while it was monitored from Autumn 2012 to Summer 2013. However, sometime between July 2013 and July 2014, the flow became violent enough to move massive boulders, as these images from the bridge camera show.
River on 22 May 2013.
River on 1 August 2014.
Note the big boulder – about 1 m high – right of centre in the foreground of the earlier image, which has been swept out of shot a year or so later.
Summer 2014
In summer 2014 we went to collect the dGPS gear – but found most of it buried in old snow from the winter.
We also did an annual survey of the ice depth with the new ground penetrating radar.
The Glacsweb 4×4 collection!
Just added a new page collecting together most of the 4x4s we have used in Iceland
rented in the UK and shipped over to Iceland – the land rover has lots of luggage space – especially on that rack – plus you never wonder if it can cope with the mountain drive.
Sunrise over Skálafellsjökull
We have been analysing the time-lapse image sequences from the river camera. Mostly it recorded at 4-hour intervals, but for a couple of days in September 2012 it took pictures every minute – the sequence is shown here.
At about noon the river rises by a few centimetres. The change is hardly noticeable, but we can measure the level quite accurately with careful image analysis, and we can see it happening by watching the river start flowing over a rock in this video.
The river rises to flow over a rock
We would like to relate this to what is happening up on the glacier. One factor is when the sun falls on the ice, and we can work this out from a map of the terrain. Here we are using a digital elevation model from the ASTER instrument aboard the Terra satellite. (ASTER GDEM is a product of METI and NASA.) The animation shows sunlit areas on the glacier and surrounding mountains increasing as the sun rises on 25 September 2012.
Simulated sunrise, 25 September 2012. Vertical scale exaggerated by factor of 5.
Getting going on CT analysis of till texture
We’re investigating the texture of till using CT scans. This shows successive sections through a sample.
Moving along the z-axis through a CT volume
The first step in the analysis is to extract the shapes of the clasts (rock fragments) embedded in the sample. These show up mainly as red in the sections above. The shape below is a clast about 3 mm long.
Base 2013 camera
This is the new view the Base station has for 2013 – with its new higher resolution webcam (this image was shrunk 50% for web speed) – the little camera board is made by e-con systems.
Tyler debugging
Tyler using our donated logic16 analyser for checking/debugging
Working on the 2013 base station
Here you can see the new shape of the 2013 base station – without wind generator (extra solar panels instead), new panel Wifi antenna on the top, new camera just below that and Topcon dGPS on the very top now. The structure has been reinforced with recovered parts from the damaged and decommissioned GPS pyramid.