Summary plot for rover3 2018-2019

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Here are some screnshots of rover3 on Breida’ – whch we moved in Aug 2019.

So rover3 moved around 12m since we set it up in Sept 2018
and rover3 dropped around 20m in altitude – most of that is due to melting

2019 expedition photos

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Prof Jane Hart at Fjallsjökull
Prof. Kirk Martinez
the view over the glacier – near the centre you can see the gps rover
crop from the above photo showing the rover to be in good condition after its winter on the glacier. The normal route we took to get there was cut off so we didn’t visit it at this point.
We carried out an image survey of the area with our quadcopter to produce a 3D model. You can see our dGPS base station in the top right. The Mapir 3 camera uses its own GPS to tag photos – hence the taped on cable and antenna.
Frey controlling the imaging flights with the Tower App – we were lucky to have good weather for our copter-imaging
it takes careful planning of flight areas and a lot of battery changing (we used nine in total)
– Fjallsárlón was impressive as usual with ice washed up from ice-falls
Updating a rover on Breida’ – the rovers were physically in good condition after a year on the ice
updating the base station at Breida’ – there are always firmware updates and new ideas to try. It survived the winter very well!
We used an Arctic Land Cruiser in 2019 which made driving close to the glaciers much easier

we moved rover1 higher up and across the glacier – it was very far down the ice after a couple of years.

luckily the equipment is quite light!
our second timelapse camera managed to capture the onset of winter.

Breiðamerkurjökull speeds up in spring 2019

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the distance moved by one of the Breiðamerkurjökull nodes shows us the glacier has started moving again – at a rate comparable to the previous autumn. Its also great that this prototype node has sent data so continuously – right through the winter!

Fjalls altitude rise

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Fjalls tracker jumped in altitude in March! it is part if its general trend to rise – probably due to the presence of the large ice-cored moraine by the side of the glacier.

AGU 2018

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Here are some photos from our American Geophysical Union (AGU) conference and visit to National Geographic in Washington.

Our poster about “The Glacier in Winter” – showing the range of processes that occur throughout the winter.
Our poster about the soft-bedded hydrology.
A view across part of the AGU poster hall in Washington. The yellow flags are where the Earth and Space Science Informatics posters are!
Visiting the National Geographic headquarters in Washington – where we met other Explorers and heard excellent short-talks about their research.
The talks in our 2018 ESSI session on “New and Emerging Technologies for Earth and Space Science” chaired with colleagues from NASA.

We also participated in the ESSI organisation and EOS.

3D model fly through of Fjallsjokull

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We captured thousands of images using a quadcopter, Survey 3 camera and then created the model with Agisoft Photoscan. Calibration targets on the ground geo-referenced the model. This fly-through is a screen capture from their viewer. The model-making process took around five days on a quad-core 4.4GHz PC. Models will be produced each year to monitor changes but they also help visualise moraine formation. The images captured were about 7mm/pixel resolution.

Good data coming in already from all nodes!

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Here is a quick snapshot of some data from the new Fjalls site:

It is already approaching 2m distance from its original location – also the jitter on the positions is very small.

This is temperature from Rover4’s Peli case, which is the heighest on Breida and is showing good variations (X axis starts in August).