Feb 12-27: Two adults + one three year old + one UHaul truck + one homemade freezer + 3000 pounds of ice cores + 3600 miles = one long trip

The ice cores we recovered from McCall Glacier in April and May of 2008 sat in the Alaska Ice Art Museum in Fairbanks all summer and into fall. Once tourist season ends, they typically shut down their freezers for the winter, but since our cores were still there they gave us the option of paying the electric bill to keep them frozen. I did this for a few months, but once it was truly winter in Fairbanks I pulled them out and put them in cold storage in an unheated/cooled garage on campus. It seemed like a fairly safe thing to do, as even a few days of warm weather would not be enough to warm the garage above freezing. But as winter headed toward spring, it was time to do something with them again. But what?

So technically this next story isn’t really a part of our summer field work, but the dynamics and topic are similar enough that I thought it would be fun to include some post-field-work efforts.

We have no ice processing facility here on campus, so it seemed clear that I needed to send them somewhere. I also have no experience with ice core processing, and would just as soon someone take over the whole analysis. The initial plan was that I was going to ship the ice to a Japanese group that does this sort of thing, but even before we went into the field it was clear that they did not get the funding they needed for this. But since I had the funding to extract the cores, it made sense to me to do it and then sort out the details of analysis later. But now was later. I had some leads, which didn’t really pan out, and then clued into the National Ice Core Laboratory in Denver. They have a long-term storage facilty as well as a processing facility. They were a little grumpy about me requesting their assistance after I pulled the coring effort rather than before, but were actually quite accommodating about it all, considering. The next question was how to get the cores there?

We made some calls to shipping companies, and for some reason most had some aversion to dealing with frozen ice cores from a glacier. Party ice, frozen fish, ice cream – these were no issue, so go figure. In any case, the only quote we got was for $25,000, and this was when we thought the total weight was about 2000 pounds. The actual weight was closer to 3000 pounds. And this price did not include any redundancies – if the reefer truck’s compressor broke down, there was no guarantee that a substitute could be found before the ice melted. Considering that I had no funding for shipping anyway, I began searching for alternatives. I settled on renting a U-Haul truck, building a home-made freezer to put inside of it, and driving the cores down there myself. The total costs seemed to work out to about $5000, which would represent a substantial savings. Plus I could combine the drive with attending a glaciology conference in Canada and with some analysis in Denver, saving even more money on travel.

I have found that people usually don’t bat an eyelash when I tell them I have weather stations running at 8000 feet in the Arctic, but that their jaw drops when I tell them I built a freezer. It makes no rational sense really, since the weather station is a much more complicated endeavor. Up until about a week ago, we lived off the electrical grid at our house. This means that any power we use we must generate ourselves. Most modern refrigerators and freezers are total powerhogs, despite what some yellow tags on them might try to convince you otherwise of. They are poorly insulated, use inefficient compressors, have loads of power consuming extras (like defrosters), and in general pay no attention to power consumption. But building an efficient one is actually quite simple. At our house, about 10 years ago, I simply built a plywood box, wrapped 4 inches of blue foam around it, and attached a kit including a very efficient DC compressor and cooling plates to it. All that is required to do to make this kit keep your food cold is to place the plates inside the box, the compressor outside the box, and attach 12V power to the compressor control. That’s it, really. You really don’t want to know what’s involved with programming a Campbell CR10x datalogger and keeping it functional through an arctic winter, trust me…

As it turned out, a major source of stress for the ice coring project was how to store the cores on the glacier before they could be flown out. When I proposed building a freezer, the entire logistical chain above me looked at me like I had two heads – a freezer? On a glacier? But, but… The alternative proposed was to sling 35 insulated boxes (a standard design used for shipping ice cores) out to the glacier via helicopter – something that would probably cost $10-$15k in shipping alone. My freezer, alternatively, would cost about $2000 to build and could fold flat into about a half of a Beaver load. The difference on the glacier would be that my freezer could mechanically keep the cores frozen should we experience prolonged warm weather, whereas the boxes could only insulate passively. Considering that the ice itself was at the melting point in situ, and we could easily get a week of above freezing temperatures this time of year, I insisted on the freezer option, and in the end had to pay for it out of my own pocket as no one in my support chain wanted the liability of my plan failing. As it turned out, the freezer worked great in the field and I did get reimbursed…

In March 2008, I built a freezer to take out to the glacier to store our ice cores in.

It's basically just a big plywood box. Everything was screwed together so that it could be pulled apart, shipped, and rebuilt in the field.

The freezer, assembled and being tested on my back porch.

The insulation is on the inside to keep it from getting bashed around in the field.

All of the pieces were labelled to make it easier to rebuild in the field.

Here's everything needed to build an ice core freezer in the field. Pretty compact considering it held 160 meters of ice core and kept them safe. That's the drill in the background.

I marked joints with stripes of magic marker, so it would be clear whether two pieces were once joined or not.

Once the freezer was up and running, we buried it as much as possible to use the snow as insulation. This did almost as much as the compressors themselves.

The freezer was placed close to the drilling operation, so that the cores could be placed within it right away.

Once it was up and running, I placed some empty totes over top of the compressors to keep the snow off them. Each compressor had it own circut breaker, so I could turn them off during storms or anything else, just in case.


Darek places the first core in the freezer. This represented a huge accomplishment, considering everything it took to get that first core.

It got easier to put the cores inside as the freezer began to fill up. Note the motion sensor camera on the left side of the box.

Time-lapse action of freezer filling with cores

I kept a data logger continuously measuring temperature at the top of the box, so we'd have a record of it all.

Ice cores inside our freezer on the glacier in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge  

Once transported to Fairbanks from the glacier, the cores sat inside the Fairbanks Ice Art Museum. They became the backdrop of a display freezer which was used to give ice carving demonstrations.

Once tourist season ended and winter started in Fairbanks, we transported them from the ice art museum to an unheated garage at UAF. As can be seen, the cores take up a lot of space!

Making our way to UAF. The nice thing about Fairbanks is that once winter starts, it doesnt end for a few months.

Their new temporary home, just set on the floor here. We just need to do something with them by March.

So with successes at home and on a glacier in hand, I bought a few more compressors and built and even larger box to accommodate the cores inside their protective cardboard tubes. Things got a little stressful when it became clear that UPS lost the extra compressors. I made plans with the company (www.novakool.com) to ship some spares to Whitehorse that we could pick up and install enroute, but as it turned out the original ones showed up on the day we planned to leave and I was able to install them that night. The whole process was a little stressful actually, as I was trying to do all this preparation in my spare time as I had other projects that demanded my daytime attention, and the freezer got built on my back porch at -20C in the dark a few days before it needed to be installed in the truck, and the truck was delayed, and the freezer was heavy, and … and … etc… But in the end, we got the truck, the freezer in the truck, the ice cores in the freezer, the freezer working, the truck working, our gear in the truck, and ourselves on our way. Whew.

The transport freezer. This one was 12 feet long, 4 feet high, and 4 feet wide. I used nails a lot more on this one, since I knew that I did not have to take it apart all the way.

I built it in February.

I put the insulation on the outside of this freezer, since it was going to live inside a truck and not be exposed to the elements. Putting in on the outside minimizes cutting and heat loss at the studs.

Getting the freezer in the truck was a bit of chore, but it worked. The freezer is designed to run off batteries during the day and then get recharged at night. I brought a commercial chest freezer (on the left) as backup. I wrapped the freezer in free moving blankets from U-Haul -- cheap insulation!

I used four compressors. These would still be underpowered to keep the ice frozen in 70F heat, but the idea was to travel in winter when the maximum temperature would only be 40-50F. There was enough room in the box to cold several hundred pounds of dry ice as well. Was I more sure of having a dry ice supply enroute, I could probably gotten away with not having any compressors at all.

So, almost exactly a month after we flew the Alcan heading north, we were driving it in a truck loaded with ice cores headed south. Our first stop was Whitehorse. I had hoped to leave a day earlier and make it to Tok to shorten our first day, but to keep on our schedule we made the Fairbanks-Whitehorse push in one 14 hour day. The road was actually quite good. The air temperatures were about -20 to -30C, which was good for the cores. Our border crossing turned out to be a non-issue, though entertaining and enlightening compared to the next border crossing. The border guard was quite friendly and naturally asked ‘So, you’ve got all of your household belongings in the truck?’ I replied that we had 3000 pounds of glacier ice core in there, which naturally caused a few seconds of stunned silence, but fortunately resulted in pleasant 5 minute conversation about global warming before the gate was raised in front of us. The remainder of the first day was largely uneventful, though our delays bumped our meeting up with Andy Williams as we got in too late. We of course had no hotel reservations and had forgotten that the Yukon Quest was starting this same weekend, but eventually we found a room and crashed for the night. As another sign of US-Canadian differences, not only did we not lock our door to the hotel, but when we woke up in the morning we discovered that we had not even closed the door! I guess you know if you’ve lived in Fairbanks too long when you can sleep through a -20C night without waking up and your first thought on seeing an open front door is whether a dog marked his territory on your stuff…

We specially requested their best truck, and we got it. Sacajawea expertly guided us across 3600 miles of North America, just like she did 200 years ago.

Making into Canada was no problem. Getting back into the states was the scary part.

Lodging is cheap in the Yukon this time of year.

Cold room aside, we had already planned to wake early the next morning and make a big push to the east that day. We got on the road long before dawn, toying with the idea of driving through the night and making Edmonton by the next morning, about a 30 hour run. Our main goal was to have enough time to visit a dinosaur museum south of Edmonton before going to the glacier meeting near Banff. So we packed up and headed off into dawn, passing some landmarks familiar to us from our last trip to Whitehorse a month earlier.

We brought a GPS with us. It was a lot more convenient than carrying this sign around.

Finding British Columbia was no problem for Sacajawea.

Fortunately she warned us about BC's midget problems...

They weren't kidding.

Canadian border guard...

And his family.

Those big heads come in useful digging through the snow to eat the grass below.

They actually plow a little road along side of the highway for the bison to walk on, presumably to keep them off the highway.

They like to hang out on sunny bluffs.

There were a lot of them. After a while Kristin made me stop stopping at each herd.

A caribou mooned us, not sure why.

The weather was beautiful for the drive. We spent much of the day wishing we had this weather for our flight last month, as it seemed perfect for flying too. But the drive was pleasant. Turner played dinosaur with mama most of the time. Eventually we broke out the DVD player, more I think to give mama a rest than to satisfy Turner. By the time it got dark, we were all fairly beat again. The road was still single lane with fairly narrow shoulders, and driving at night increased the potential hazards, and after 14 hours of driving we decided to stay at Ft. Nelson. I remember flying through Ft Nelson and not getting a very warm fuzzy feeling about it, but driving through town it seemed like a nice place. So we found a hotel with a water slide and gave Turner some splash time.

There's a dinosaur in our truck!

Turner, learning to multitask.

Not sure why, but nearly every hotel in BC and Alberta has a water side, and advertises for it boldly.

We didn’t get as early a start the next morning, but still we were off near dawn. A month ago it was much easier to be ready by dawn, since dawn happened later in the day, but now it was starting to get tough. I really hadn’t had a full night sleep in weeks, so was starting to feel the exhaustion of that. But in any case our goal for the day was Edmonton. We had hoped to arrive there early enough in the day to go to the world largest shopping mall, complete with water park. But as we headed further east, the road quality actually deteriorated and the traffic increased considerably. Plus there was a time change, so that by the time we hit Edmonton more than 12 hours later, not only was the waterpark closed but the pool in the hotel was closed too. It was just as well I guess as our swimsuits were frozen solid in the back. Fortunately so was the ice.

We had great weather on the trip, and fortunately it was well below freezing all the way.

Our choice in the morning was to either spend the day at the world’s largest mall or head to the dinosaur museum in Drumheller. We opted for the dinosaur museum. It was only about a 3 hour drive away, and then about 3 hours to the glaciology meeting location after that, so we figured we had plenty of time. I think it was the right choice as the museum was excellent. Tons of full-sized skeletons, loads of information on the process of paleontology, etc. Turner was manic – running from display to display saying ‘look at this one mama’, ‘look at this one papa’. There were giant sea reptiles, meat eaters, plant eaters. Turner knew the names of most of them on sight. The gift store was also a big hit. They had many dinosaur figurines that we hadn’t found elsewhere, and Turner picked up the names right away and began explaining them to the check out girl, who thought he was from Europe or something, as she didn’t know any dinosaur names.

Alberta was also cold, fortunately. And the home of lots of dinosaur bones!

Dinosaurs have big bones!

Egg robbers!

Albertosaurus!

No dinosaur museum is complete without a T-Rex.

Turner: "I want to take them all home with me!"

I forgot this one's name. But Turner would know.

Turner: "No mom, this is a Chasmosaurus bone"

It was a bit sketchy at times, but Sacajawea bravely got us through it all.

A big dinosaur in Drumheller Alberta (15 Feb 09 1340) in Canada  

Not your typical viewpoint.

It was a nice excursion in terms of scenery too. The museum is located in a badlands, formed by the sudden outburst of some glacial dammed lake thousands of years ago. So you drive through farm country, with no evidence of geological outcroppings or dinosaur country, then drop into these twisty valleys that were scoured by the flood where suddenly all kinds of rock strata are exposed. Apparently Alberta is a hotbed of dinosaur hunting activity, and thus the reason for the museum. The town it is in has totally embraced the activity, as down nearly every street there are dinosaur sculptures or some business with dinosaur in the name.

On our way to the meeting we swung through Calgary to rent a car so that Kristin and Turner would have a way to explore without using the truck. The meeting itself was held in a research station run by the University of Calgary, but was located a hour away in a remote location. The directions we had were pretty vague, and navigating in two cars complicated things a bit. But eventually we turned down the right road and wandered around in the dark for while before some fellow glaciologists found us and pointed us in the right direction.

The meeting itself was fun and interesting, as usual. Most folks had come a day or two early to ski at one of the nearby resorts, or had trips planned afterwards. We didn’t bring skis, as it was just getting too complicated planning for all of the different aspects of the trip already. Fortunately for us, the snow was apparently not all that great for skiing…

The ice survived just fine all the way to the meeting.

One piece of core bravely volunteered to be sacfriced in a show and tell...

While there I heard several talks on ice core analyses which got me more excited about analyzing our cores from McCall Glacier. It struck me even further though that analyzing ice cores is a fairly involved and complicated process, and further that our core was going to be a challenging one to study because of it being a valley glacier rather than an ice cap like most such studies. Valley glaciers are constantly flowing and deforming, stretching and warping the layers. Our is also located in the wet-snow zone, which means that in summer the surface is melting and the meltwater is dripping into the snowpack of previous years, mixing and blurring the annual signals. But I left the meeting more optimistic than I arrived.

The meeting ended on a Wednesday. There was not enough time to get to Denver before the National Ice Core Lab closed on Friday, but we were eager to head south. The last major hurdle of the trip was getting back into the States through border patrol. This had the potential of being a disaster. I had called a few weeks earlier and they said there should be no issue, but you never really know, and if they made me empty out the truck in the above freezing temperatures, we could lose everything. Sure enough, the guards were the gruff, anti-social, speak-only-when-spoken-to type. No friendly conversation about climate change here. Not even a polite good afternoon. They rolled their eyes when they asked for paperwork which I didn’t have, but couldn’t tell me what type of paperwork I should have had. They roamed around in the back of the truck for a while without letting me explain what not to break or letting me out of the truck, and then ordered me to drive through the commercial truck stop, essentially passing the buck on to the guys there. Here politeness was also not considered appropriate, and we were ordered to drive through some scanning machine, start, stop, etc., and then told to drive and keep going through the gate. I didn’t argue, though I was disappointed that there was no ‘Welcome to the US’ sign or something to get a picture in front of. I’d really like to see a study which shows that acting like unfriendly, authoritarian pricks is better at finding bad guys than doing the same job but being friendly and treating everyone with respect. The difference between border crossings is quite obvious – the Canadians treat everyone as innocent until proven guilty and the Americans treat everyone as guilty and don’t really care if you’re innocent even after they harass you and find nothing. I’m nearly certain this is by design – it’s not a difference in the people, but in they way they are told or trained to act. It really should be no surprise that most of the rest of world hates us.

Sacajawea was glad to be back on her old stomping grounds.

It was a bit warmer in Montana, but still near or below freezing.

Having made it back into our country, we decided to take our time and spend a few days in Bozeman. We have family there to stay with, it was still a lot colder there than Denver, and there was another dinosaur museum to visit. Kristin’s cousin Jamie is a curator there, so we got a personal tour. Turner was once again too excited to listen to much of it, but it was interesting also to get a behind-the-scenes look at an active research museum. This one was quite a bit smaller than the last one, but still filled with interesting displays, particularly of age-sequences of dinosaurs, for example showing a range of triceratops skeletons from baby to adult sized.

Turner finally found someone who liked to play dinosaurs as much as he did -- his cousin Ellie.

They played any time of day or night.

And they played everywhere.

And I mean everywhere.

Like peas in a pod.

I guess its good that they are not genetically related...

Turner: "Don't wait up dad..."

Ellie's brother James wasnt sure he liked where this was heading.

Day-time temperatures were now above melting, so I supplemented the freezers with some dry ice. Dry ice is the solid form of carbon dioxide, and has a freezing temperature of about -80. I bought some in Fairbanks before we left just to see how long it would last, and after 3 days it was gone. One nice thing about dry ice is that it doesn’t melt, it sublimates, meaning that there is no drippy liquid stage like with regular water ice. I guess that’s why they call it dry ice. In any case, the price of dry ice here was only about a quarter of the same in Fairbanks, and they sell it in large quantities in the local supermarkets. So I cleaned them out, and soon the temperature at the top of the freezer was colder than 30 below, as my wireless thermometer wouldn’t even register it.

So after a nice visit, we were off again for the final leg of the trip. The ice was still plenty cold despite the increasingly warm temperatures, even after 12 hours of driving. By the time we pulled in to Kristin’s sister’s house, Turner was long since asleep and we were all beat. I had picked up a cold along the trip and was completely exhausted, and had to wake up early to get the ice to NICL. So we said our hellos and dropped into bed.

We gave Sacajawea the night off to party down with her old friends.

Now the ice was in Denver and last the goal was within reach – getting the ice out of the truck and into NICL’s freezers, where it would be their responsibility to keep it frozen. While at the glacier meeting last week I sent out some frantic emails to friends in the area asking for help with the unloading and processing, and fortunately got a big response. The folks at NICL were great, though I think not really sure what to think of this guy driving a U-Haul with a home-made freezer inside of it. But proof is in the pudding, and the fact that we arrived successfully was a sign that I was at least not a total wingnut. So unloading the cores went off without a hitch, and I spread out some of my new posters of gigapixel images of the three coring sites and we had a nice discussion of glaciers and ice coring.

Wyoming was glad to see us.

We drove the truck right inside the warehouse. Normally I guess the cores are delivered in insulated boxes, rather than in a homemade freezer in a U-Haul, so some new systems for off-loading needed to be developed.

Et voila!

Not the normal way these tubes are transported, but we got 170 of them here without coming close to melting them.

Once out of the truck, they were quickly taken to storage room and shelved.

It may not mean much to most people, but this picture represents the culmination of a lot of work, and even more relief!

The last major task of the trip was to actually take samples from the cores to do some preliminary analyses. The idea here is to cut a thin disk off the end of each 1 meter section of core to do a coarse survey throughout its length. Ideally we would cut longitudinal strip of the entire core and make a continuous measurement along its length, but this takes real money and time which I don’t have the funding for. So the coarse survey is a cheap means of getting some initial results, which we can then hopefully use to generate funding for a complete analysis.

There are a number of things which can be analyzed in an ice core. At first, we’re concentrating on two things. First are stable isotopes of oxygen and hydrogen. These are naturally-occurring variants of the standard molecules. They are a bit heavier than the standard ones, so they tend to fall out of the sky quicker than the lighter ones. This distillation can occur due to changes in temperatures, distance from the ocean moisture source, and other processes. So it’s a little complicated, but basically by measuring the ratio of heavy to light molecules you can learn some pretty amazing stuff. The second analysis is taking a look for the concentrations of about 30 elements trapped in the ice, such as would be found in sea salts, volcanic ash, windblown dust, etc. These can give us a sense of where the snow came from, variations in level of pollution over time, forest fire frequency. Ultimately there are also a lot more tests that can be done, such as for heavier metals, pollen, gas composition, but these will have to wait until we learn more about the easy stuff to measure.

So we spent the rest of that afternoon and the next two days slicing and dicing ice. We got a lot of help from various scientists in the area who had a few hours to spare here and there, and who enjoyed getting the experience of working with ice cores. The task itself was pretty straightforward. Basically we take a core tube off the rack, open it up and make sure the inner bag has the same label as the outer tube, reconfirm the measurements of length, enter this information into NICL’s database, then cut off a hockey puck, cut this in half, then bag the two pieces and label them appropriately. The complications come from discrepancies in field labeling, some subjectivity when determining the length of a core with jagged ends, etc. In the end though we were able to sort through it all, get an accurate inventory, and prepare the necessary samples for shipment. It was a big effort in all – from coring to storing to transporting to cutting – but it was quite satisfying to get to this stage, and I finished with some enthusiasm for continuing the process once we explore the initial results.

Not a sign you see every day. The processing room was -25C and the storage room was -35C.

Eric updates the database with our core info. The computer sits inside a heated box.

The other Eric tries to read our hand writing...

Buck keeps maintains a paper copy of the notes as a backup.

Eric demonstrates the best way to staple the core bag closed.

NICL is set up with all kinds of band saws. This is one of the easiest cuts to make -- just a cross-cut, creating a piece the size of a hockey puck.

Kathy then takes the puck and cuts it in half, being careful not to cut her fingers off.

The final step is sealing the ice inside a bag, using this heat sealer to melt the edge. A second compartment is sealed in the same bag to contain the label for which piece of ice it is, such that the ice and label stay together but dont touch each other.

The two samples are then put into two different boxes for shipping to different labs.

 
Ice in long-term cold storage at NICL in USA

Cutting ice in NICL (24 Feb 09 1206) in USA

There was really no rest for the weary though. Staying at Kristin’s sister’s house meant an hour and a half commute for me each day, and getting kicked and punched all night long by Turner as we all had to sleep in the same bed, coupled with my cold (which was likely strep throat), rapidly turned me into a zombie. But there was a still a lot of packing to do to get ready for our flight in the morning – our survival gear, tools, freezer parts, etc. – all had to packaged and made ready to ship. But we got it all done, and I think I slept nearly the entire way back on the plane and most of the next day. Two days later I’m just started to get some energy back, and already the deluge of work required to prepare for this upcoming field season is beginning to hit me. But I cant complain, it’s all part of the process of field science, we are making progress, and we still have hope that this progress is making a difference in the way the world understands how climate change is affecting our planet.

We had to get rid of a lot of stuff. I gave the insulation to NICL, but they didnt want the box.

So Kristin's brother-in-law turned the freezer into a kids playhouse.

Complete with two choices for doors.

And even a shag carpet!

Turner: "Let's do it again!"
Papa: "Sure, just wake me up when IPY5 starts..."

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