LeConte Glacier Deployments

Timeline

Location

  As part of my time working on the Robotic Oceanographic Surface Sampler, I had the fantastic opportunity to be deployed at the LeConte Glacier in Alaska! This started in early 2017 with setup and ocean trials in nearby Petersburg. The team had sent multiple shipping containers with our robotic platforms and most equipment to assemble, test, and debug them a few months prior, allowing us to get to work the moment we arrived. We spent multiple weeks at the docks with our makeshift workstations built from plywood and pelican cases, validating the hardware we'd sent, and making adjustments with improved hardware we'd hand-carried on our flights. This also provided a great opportunity to work out any final firmware and/or software bugs while the vehicles were still relatively easy to retrieve. After a short trip back home to recover, and prep any last minute items we'd forgotten, our research team flew back and headed for the glacier!

  The towering mountain of ice sits roughly 30 miles from Petersburg, so we'd commissioned an off-season fishing vessel, Steller, and it's crew, to take us as close to it as was reasonably safe. The team worked 24 hours a day, on two shifts, deploying and retrieving the ROSS platforms, performing repairs (as needed), recovering/processing collected data, manually deploying the ship's CTD, and occasionally spending considerable time pushing icebergs the size of houses away from an ADCP mounted to Steller using fiberglass poles. Many hardware failures had to be solved during these long days, and it was a very rewarding and creative experience to work around the limitations of this isolated (and salty) environment.

  On top of being a unique engineering and team building experience, LeConte lives among the most beautiful places I've yet to experience in this life. There's something special about being somewhere so incredibly remote and untouched by humans. The pristine evergreen forests, eerie blue-green hues of the glacier and icebergs, ancient towering mountains, and genuinely curious looks from local land and marine life unfamiliar with human presence made it humbly clear that for once we as humans were the odd ones out. These trips were ones that I will treasure and think back on fondly on for the rest of my life.