Research

Ikaaġvik Sikukun

Native Village of Kotzebue, Arctic Alaska.

The Ikaaġvik Sikukun (Inupiaq for “Ice Bridges”) project employs the principles of knowledge co-production, bridging the scientific and Indigenous communities to study the changing sea ice environment of Kotzebue Sound, guided by the Traditional Ecological Knowledge of an Indigenous Elder Advisory Council. Learn more about our work by watching a series of short documentary videos or reading our community newsletters (Spring 2019, Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Fall 2020). And check out my poster at AGU Fall Meeting 2020!

The Sea Surface Microlayer

Research Vessel Falkor, Equatorial Pacific

Using a suite of autonomous aircraft, drifting buoys, and shipboard sampling equipment, the Sea Surface Microlayer team undertook a multi-disciplinary study of upper ocean processes and air-sea heat exchange in the presence of surfactants, such as enormous blooms of cyanobacteria and floating rafts of volcanic pumice. Learn more about the project by watching our weekly cruise videos (Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4) or reading some entries in our cruise log.

Deep Water formation in Terra Nova Bay polynya

Ice-Breaking Research Vessel Araon, West Antarctica

In collaboration with the Korea Polar Research Institute’s LIONESS project, we installed a heavily instrumented oceanographic mooring in the Terra Nova Bay polynya, a ‘sea ice factory’ where some of the world’s densest water forms before flowing off the Antarctic continental shelf into the abyssal Southern Ocean. Check out some preliminary results from this work on Una Miller’s poster at AGU Fall Meeting 2020!

The TKE budget across the air-sea interface

Air-Sea Interaction Tower, Martha's Vineyard Coastal Observatory

We have succesfully completed a winter of measurements on the ASIT tower, and data analysis is underway.

Photography

Metamorphic Terrane rises from the ancestral homeland of the Sauk-Suiattle people, known now as North Cascades National Park.

Still waters in Antarctic Dusk.

A remote Inupiaq camp along the shores of Kotzebue Sound.

There are glorious, almost tropical-feeling skies to be found in Antarctica's "Banana Belt".

The early stages of ice formation create an ethereal layer atop the ocean surface. The later stages aren't too shabby either.

Pika, the little chief hare, nibbles away in preparation for lean months above tree line.

Ironside Glacier winds its lazy way down to the sea, forging forward at the blistering pace of a meter per day in its quest to float away.

A Pacific horizon from the Nā Pali coast.

A startled Adelie dives for cover.

Magic in the margins of the Ross Sea.

Pollinators.

Glacial pillars breach the sea surface, an ocean's architectural masterpiece.

Sunset over Noepe, as the island was known to the People of the First Light, witnessed on the return journey from Martha's Vineyard Coastal Observatory.

McMicken Island, my spiritual home. So named for the Washington Surveyor General who "found" it, with little regard for the island's mysteries nor its relationship to the Squaxin.

A piece of Possession Island, whose name may smack of colonial avarice, but whose body remains thoroughly un-possessed.

The active stratovolcano Mt. Melbourne looms aside the moon.

An adult Ha:sañ (Saguaro) cactus, old enough to have lost many Tohono O'odham friends over the past 150 years, but unlikely to be old enough to tell us why the irrigation economy of the Hohokam collapsed here centuries earlier.

April clouds striving in vain to stave off the impression of ice-lessness in the prematurely open waters around Cape Blossom, Alaska.

My Mer. Take a Hike!

A juvenile Natchiq (Ringed Seal), its coat in limbo between the fuzzy white of a pup and the silverback of an adolescent, waits for its momma to return with a fresh catch.

Icebreaking away from Jang Bogo station, South Korea's West Antarctic outpost.

The waters of Whulj (Puget Sound).

A glacier tributary high in Aotearoa, land of the long white cloud.

The perpetual sunset of late summer in the southern reaches.

Seal holes drain meltwater off the surface of spring sea ice.

Nansen Ice Shelf, named for the Nobel Peace Prize winner and most empathetic of explorers, Fridtjof Nansen.

Waimea Canyon.

SPIP and SNIFFEL, acronymical autonomous ocean explorers and best of friends.

Who dat?

The ice beach of Kikiktagruk in spring.

Inexpressible island, so named by a party of explorers forced to winter unexpectedly against its cliffs, striving to shelter from 80-knot katabatic winds in a personal hell they could not find words to express.

Lines and scales.

The view from Aoraki.

Oceanographic buoy deployment in the wee hours of the morn.

Emperor Penguins roll deep.

Antarctic fall sun teasing us with the threat of its departure.

Oceanic Langmuir turbulence, a series of spiral circulations in the direction of the wind and waves, organizes newly forming grease ice into streaks across Terra Nova Bay.

A piece of Terra Australis, the Southern Continent hypothesized to exist even in the time of Ptolemy, and first sighted (by anyone who felt it was worth making a big deal out of) in 1820.

The geothermally heated summit of Mt. Melbourne is an oasis in the midst of extremes, host to a rich and unique community of life.

Drone over dappled ice. It takes off like a quadcopter but flies like a plane, probing the atmosphere of remote regions with the sensors on its nose.