ALISS: Arctic Lake Ice Systems Science

Feelin’ Groovy on Snow and Ice

11/29/2018

Got rollin’ around 8am today and after prepping gear and gassing machines, out the door by noon. While cruising to Peatball Lake, I decided that the key to today was to slow down and not move to fast. So we tried a new set of measurements. Usually we measure ice thickness by drilling 3-5 holes near the lake center, spaced about 10-m apart and trying to catch the range of snow variation within the area. Today we set up a grid with benchmarks at the 4 corners and measurements using standard kovacs gauge and graduated rod for snow. On second corner (NW) we hit overflow (water on top of ice).

I kind of got stuck in it actually because Ben told me to drive over to check it out and foolishly (because I knew it would be cool) I came. He pulled me out and we proceeded to set up other corners. We then stopped to test out Ben’s drone with a camera. It flew just fine at about 180 ft above use along a programmed grid. Picture is it looking down on us and machines. Amazing really, as blowing at least 20 mph and about 0F.

Cool tool! Then we marched around and drilled 36 holes along a grid and used relatively precision gps and magna probe to measure snow and ice on a 160 X 160 grid. Data looks really cool actually and seems to follow these blowing frazel ice features that we could see in Planet Cube imagery back in October. Cool stuff! Sometimes you just gotta slow down and feel groovy!