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River of Ice

This is Kviárjökull, a glacier of the Vatnajökull Ice Cap in Iceland. Frequent volcanic eruptions in Iceland sprinkle a lot of black debris on glaciers’ white surfaces. Sometimes the glaciers’ termini, where the rivers of ice flow to meet the sea, are completely black. Graduate students in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program stopped here on a field trip that culminated the 2016 Geodynamics Program, an annual semester-long series of seminars by top scientists who share their cutting-edge research on a particular earth science topic. The 2016 program focused on ice-ocean interactions, including glaciology, sea-ice dynamics, marine ecosystems in the polar regions, and novel observational platforms used in ice-choked locales. (Photo by Laura Stevens, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)