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Packing for a Glacial Visit

What do you take if you’re planning for 100 days camped at the foot of a glacier? A Kindle full of books, a guitar, and, if you’re lucky, a very complex puzzle. The first two, MIT/WHOI Joint Program student Benjamin Linhoff made sure to pack. The last, he expects to find waiting for him at the terminus of the Leverett Glacier in western Greenland. Linhoff will be spending the next three months collecting samples of meltwater from lakes on top of the glacier and pouring from the base. He hopes to use these to untangle the complex and largely invisible processes that occur inside the glacier and that might be contributing to recent increases in the flow of ice from the Greenland Ice Sheet to the surrounding ocean. Readers can keep up with his experiences on his blog, Following the Ice.(Photo by Tom Kleindinst, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)