Journal

Aborted Flight

For today's flight we headed south and then east across the ice cap to the eastern shore. Unfortunately, cloud cover on the east side kept us from getting views of the spectacular SE coast.

Shadow
Our faithful companion.

We did fly over one on the abandoned DEW (Distant Early Warning) radars. These remote facilities, built in the late 1950's, acted as a radar "fence" should the Soviets attempt to engage us from the north. I rather wonder what life would have been like back then in such a remote outpost. It is also a convenient location for collecting survey data and thus we needed to fly over it. This site's name is Dye 3.

Dye 3
The abandoned Dye 3 DEW site, now used as a convenient survey marker.

Clouds prevented us from collecting data along the immediate coast The only glimpse we had of a calving front occurred at Helheim GlacierA mass of ice that persists for many years and notably deforms and flows under the influence of gravity.. Fortunately the weather cooperated as we flew over that one. The crew spent some time stitching together our downward pointing DMS digital photos. I'm also included colorized lidar (laser) data that goes along with it. A photo taken from straight above does not allow the viewer any sense of vertical relief. But the lidar data does. I did my best to scale the two so they align perfectly. Since the scale is not included let me give it to you. The darkest blues represent 50 m elevation, the pale turquoise is at 80 m, and the orange is at about 115 m. So the iceberg in front of the calving face is about 115-50 = 65 m tall, about 215 feet!

Helheim
The calving front of Helheim Glacier is on the right. A huge iceberg is in front of it. The colors (from our laser data) allow you to determine relative heights. For a sense of scale horizontally, the picture spans about 1.4 miles.

Finally, we had to cut our trip short today. An oil cap seal was leaking on engine #4. Once the oil started heading toward the hot exhaust outlet the crew decided that it was time to go. Other than the small potential of catching fire - not much really - this issue is the functional equivalent of pulling out of a gas station and forgetting to put your fuel cap back on. You'd feel better having it on, but nothing is really affected by it. Same thing here (until, of course, the oil pressure drops too low, but we weren't close on that front).

Engine #4
Oil leak on engine #4. You can clearly see it streaming over the engine cowling. You know something is going on when your pilots and mechanics each walk back and look out the window at the engine. At first I naively thought they were looking at the view...

At this point we had finished most of the mission anyway, so we didn't miss too much data.

Details
Author
Russell Hood
Date
Expedition
Airborne Survey of Polar Ice 2014
Weather Summary
Scattered clouds, breezy
Temperature
15
Wind Speed
15

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Comments

Sat, 04/26/2014 - 13:56

Russell Hood

Austin-Good questions.  There is no "ground truthing" of the data as there doesn't need to be.  There are a few exercises where the team needs to do some ground surveying in order to calibrate some of the instruments, but that can be done anywhere.  In this case they surveyed the airport ramp.The only time the team flies during the night is when they do sea ice surveys.  They don't need to do it then but due to the time of year they will inevitably spend some time flying in the dark during their flights.  (Apparently the laser looks pretty neat then!).-Mr. Hood

Fri, 04/25/2014 - 12:23

Guest

This is Austin Dabbs, I am wondering I you go down to ground and examine anything or do you remain in your planes and just gather data that way? Also I was wondering if you go on any overnight plane rides to get data at night or in places that are farther away?

Tue, 04/15/2014 - 09:49

Guest

This is Mike. Thanks for the scaled images. This will help as we continue our study of wave phenomena and put it to useful analogies. Keep up the great work explaining what you're experiencing - it is really letting us live vicariously throughout your posts to an experience we can only dream of. Best wishes!