What is a glaciologist?
What sort of work does that entail? I am a glaciologist, which is a fancy way of saying that I study ice. There are many flavors of glaciologists from those who study ice crystals (to better understand the physical properties of ice) to those who examine ice cores (to reconstruct past climate variability) to those who look at how big ice sheets work. I’m the latter kind. In particular, I’m interested in how the ice sheets move. I’m also what you’d call an observational geophysicist which is a fancy way of saying that I measure how, when and why the ice moves using geophysical equipment. I specialize in using ice-penetrating radar techniques which allow me to get a picture of the internal layers and the base of the ice sheet. These pictures are very much like looking at a road cut along a highway and interpreting why the rock layers look like they do. Instead, we look at ice layers and interpret how they are deformed using ice flow models. This allows us to determine the ice flow histor
