We are pleased to announce that on Friday June 2nd Walter Immerzeel received the Boussinesq Prize 2017,a tri-annual award given to a person for recognition of his/her outstanding scientific contributions to hydrological sciences. It was awarded by prof. Bob Su at the Boussinesq Spring Meeting 2017 in Enschede. At the meeting Walter gave a keynote presentation on “Recent advances in understanding climate, glacier and river dynamics in high mountain Asia”. A video of this presentation can be watched here.
Have you always wondered what these prestigious, multi-million euro research grants from the European Research Council (ERC) are all about? Are you interested how ERC research projects relate to your daily life? Together with nine other ERC laureates from Utrecht University, Walter Immerzeel presented his ERC research during the ERC Day ‘Utrecht Inspires’ on 28 March, which was part of celebrations of the 10th Anniversary of the ERC.
I am visiting Canmore in the Canadian Rocky Mountains to collaborate with Joe Shea on a new unmanned aerial vehicle study led by the Centre for Hydrology of the University of Saskatchewan. The objective is to monitor snow melt and redistribution throughout the melt season using UAV surveys and in situ measurements of the snow pack. The study site is near Fortress Mountain at about 2300 m elevation and is easily accessible by a combination of car and snowmobile.
Unfortunately, the site is often used by the film industry for winter forest scenes. Miscommunication has had us travel up there last week on snowmobiles to find out we could not fly because of a movie shoot. Additionally, the movie crew considerably disturbed the snow pack of interest…
Therefore, we went off to a new site just a bit further up the ridge today. Of course only after checking the weather and wind conditions using the various self-maintained weather stations at the site. Objective: redo the entire ground control survey that was carried out at the other site and perform some UAV flights.
Conditions on the ridge were a bit windy at first but we had faith it would settle down in the afternoon for the flights. Instead of settling down though, strong wind and heavy gusts came in at lunch time. Besides not being able to fly because of the wind, pounding in ground control poles and measuring them with the DGPS rover was not even possible since the gusts made walking around in the snow with all the gear next to impossible. Turned out to be the worst winds of the whole week. Let’s hope for better luck next time we’re in…
Getting up the ridge with snowmobiles and toboggans.
Pannable 360-panorama of the site on Fortress Ridge and the DGPS setup.
Onset of the winds while doing the final DGPS setup.
Graph of wind speed measured at Fortress Mountain over the last week.
Pascal and several team members have just had published their paper, A physically based 3-D model of ice cliff evolution over debris-covered glaciers, in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface. They used a new data set of high-resolution observations of cliff evolution over one ablation season to identify patterns of changes over four cliffs on the debris-covered tongue of Lirung Glacier (Nepalese Himalaya). The four cliffs have different shape, dominant orientation and slopes, and different degree and history of coupling to a supraglacial pond. The observations show that cliffs on the same glacier and at short distance from each other can both flatten and recline, remain self-similar, or expand radially. Based on the observations a model accounting for the three main processes controlling cliff evolution was developed: atmospheric melt, pond contact ablation enhancement for the cliff base, and reburial by surrounding debris. This modeling approach is able to simulate the cliff evolution over one melt season in a satisfying way in terms of horizontal and vertical extent as well as mean slope and aspect. Modelled volume losses could be validated and were in agreement with TIN-based observations (Brun et al. 2016, Journal of Glaciology).
Simulated cliff evolution based on the monthly updated outlines.
The model is able to capture the main cliff dynamics and geometric transformation. Importantly, the model application has clearly shown that for very high resolution studies, neglecting a dynamic update of the cliff geometry would lead to erroneous results in terms of backwasting patterns and volumes.
We collect most of the data we use in our research in the field, in recent years to a large degree in the Nepalese Himalayas. Field work can have effects on your health – it’s cold, oxygen levels are low, work is exhausting and you are always a bit nervous about whether the next sensor you read out will actually have any data stored. All we have is ourselves – there is no internet or phone connection in our field site, there are showers, however not all team members know how to use it. We realized that this exhaustion somehow articulates itself by lack of sleep and weird songs stuck in your head. For the sake of future research in high altitude psychology we decided to document this mess from our recent trip to Langtang in October.
All the songs listed suddenly surfaced – mostly while walking – as humming or whistling by some team member and then quickly spread through the group and sometimes remained for days in our heads or quickly disappeared again. Most of them made us laugh, many were a nuisance and for some reason very few were actually good music.
To give you an idea of the deteriorating path we took during nearly 6 weeks in the field I’ll start at the very end. While by all common standards we could be declared more or less sane at the start of our work, on the very last day of our trip Joe, an outstanding musician and singer who has played on stages in a number of countries and myself, trained in classical music at University and hence supposedly with a good taste by upbringing, sang and danced respectively to …
The closest we got to putting a ring somewhere was the ring memory of our sturdy Campbell Scientific CR1000. We were joined by a completely hammered Nepali soldier looking for cigarettes, alcohol and entertainment and our steadfast porters who must wonder again and again whether the work we produce is actually worth anything at all considering our behaviour after a day’s work.
When we were asked by our local porters to sing our field song at parties that were regularly thrown in the kitchen tent or lodge we stayed in, for some strange reason we would sing
regularly, strange because the only Italian on the team hated it and none of the rest speak any Italian.
To reach our stations at the very back of the valley we always have an easy half day hike along the main river of the catchment. This year we could witness wild boars along the sand banks and yak herds crossing the forceful stream which we could only cross on bridges made from flagpoles.
Crossing with station equipment
Self made bridge over Langtang river
Yaks crossing the same river
The rockfalls along the river as a result of the earthquake in 2015 are impressive.
Rockfall as a result of the earthquake
New Rock Slide over the river
Having reached our camp, we played cards the whole evening sipping some of Joe’s fine treat – Whiskey transported in a Nalgene bottle. Like every night our kitchen staff would come around after a while and fill up our bottles with hot water for the night. In the dark, nobody noticed the difference between the half full Nalgene and the other water bottles. The result was a lukewarm, diluted Whiskey. Quite a downer at that point.
Remembering Whiskey …
Although we do make quite silly mistakes at times especially when working very high when the exhaustion and oxygen loss really kicks in perceptibly we do seem to be able to find matching song texts for the occasion. “Plug out that cable!” …”Are you sure? Do you really want that? Really really …?”
And likely on the approach to reading out a precious datalogger in the remotest location (although I’m not sure where that song popped up)
Many of those “earworms” as we call them in German were such a nuisance and difficult to get rid of, that Joe with everyone roped up on the glacier above 5300 m suddenly called for a halt. “Can you please help me get rid of that song in my head?”
Group roped up on Yala Glacier
View from the high weather station above 5000 m
Aptly for those sometimes quite difficult ascents at this elevation there was
at one point. That surely came from my side since I also come up with other romantic hogwash like Bryan Adams. But it seems that song only comes to me below a certain 02 threshold, I fail to remember which one it was.
After 3 days in high camp – if you wonder, that’s what it looks like if you can’t sleep:
– words and sanity left us completely and for a few hours the “refrain” of
became a thing. Luckily didn’t last long.
Neither did
which hit Joe’s patriotic side next to a Pluviometer in horrible weather.
What our team of porters produces in this environment on the culinary side is always impressive. So are the views during the day and at night.
Last sunrays on Gangchampo
Card playing still ongoing
Kitchen busy at night with Lirung peak in the back
Before we are served dinner in our high altitude restaurant, we do get a bowl of soup which prompts everyone to crawl out of the tent again, stopping the late afternoon nap or field report writing. For some unbeknown reason I always whistle
during soup time. I’m too young for the Archies and didn’t even know the song. But always a team, Joe helped out and quickly put a title to my annoying habit.
We arrived back in Kathmandu in a horrible Jeep on a congested road with a song on the MP3 on repeat that really never should have existed.
