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| 2001 Team |
Brian Welch
Field Assistant
St. Olaf College
Northfield, Minnesota
I am a postdoctoral fellow at St. Olaf College working with Bob Jacobel (Bob ran our radar system for the 1999 ITASE traverse) in the Physics Department. Part of my time is spent on the ITASE research program and the rest on teaching a course or two during the Spring semester. This is my third trip to Antarctica with ITASE. I am currently finishing up my PhD from the University of Wyoming. There I study melt-water flow through glaciers both with radar observations and computer models. Most of my research was on temperate valley glaciers in Alaska.
I am part of Bob Jacobel's Glacier Research Group at St. Olaf College. We work with undergraduate students from the Physics Dept. who spend the summer developing our radar system, processing data, or helping with summer field trips to glaciers in the U.S. and Sweden. The radar system we use for the ITASE program is towed along the surface at the end of the train. It measures the ice thickness over the bedrock. We also record echoes from internal layers within the ice which result from atmospheric deposits: volcanic acids and dust, salt brine from the ocean, etc.
St. Olaf's contribution to the ITASE project will be making maps of the internal structure of the ice and the bedrock surface beneath the ice sheet. We can then try to correlate our reflection layers with data from ice cores. The radar results will also enable investigators to depict the ice flow patterns around each of the core sites. Finally, I hope to use the radar data to characterize the bedrock and glacial till deposits beneath the ice sheet.
On a personal note, I grew up in northern New York where I was a competitive cross country skier for many years. My wife, Sue, and I had a little boy, Patrick, in April, 2001. It's tough to leave home and miss watching him grow and learn. Sue, Patrick and the rest of the family in New York state and Boston will be following the traverse progress on the Museum of Science's web site.
