Melt, 30 May–20 June 2010: Chris Petrich

Kerry Claffey started the summer season with daily snow and albedo measurements. Fun on June 5, a polar bear tampers with snow depth sounders and radiometers. Hat-trick! This is the fifth season we deployed the Mass Balance Probe, and the third season in a row it got damaged by a bear (2008, 2009, 2010). The year prior to that (2007), an Arctic fox chewed through some cables the day after we froze-in instruments. Kerry measured surface ablation with a ground-based LIDAR every other day which kept him out of trouble. Josh Jones and myself spent a week on the ice to do another under-ice radiometer transect this year, this one propelled by home-brew gear rather than an Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV). We had comparatively strong currents under the ice that determined the direction of the transect. Ancillary measurements and analysis took up much of the remaining time (anybody keen on filtering samples, send me your cv!). Andy Mahoney joined the party when we recovered the Mass Balance probe with the steam drill. All instruments were still solidly frozen into the ice, very unlike last year. We left Kerry to do his measurements in peace after Josh did some characterizations of pressure ridges visible in the coastal RADAR.

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