Guest blog: Rock ‘n’ Roll, Ice ‘n’ Slide

Here's a second guest blog by Sam Hayes, a PhD student from Northumbria University and regular commenter on the Arctic Sea Ice Forum. For his studies Sam was part a research expedition in the Arctic Circle.

In his first guest blog Sam described his impressions so far, and in this second installment he goes into more detail on some of the sites that he has visited and the methods the research team has been using. Sam has just about returned home now and will share some more as soon as he has become used to his old, comfortable life again. No more digging! ;-)

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Rock ‘n’ Roll, Ice ‘n’ Slide
by Sam Hayes

Our first full day in action was August 11^th. In sunshine and mid teen temperatures, we loaded the truck with the day’s gear and headed to the floating dock where we met with our local Inuvialuit boat driver, Frank. He would be our primary means of access to local sites for the next 7 days, as well as assisting us with collecting moorings and other instruments. His wife, Nelly, would even provide us with freshly caught trout and whitefish, yum!

 

Our hired boat and from left to right, Dustin, Mike, Frank and Vlad

As well as Frank and his 150hp harbour craft, we also had a smaller zodiac with a 20hp motor, great for getting to those tighter, shallower spots — and a whole lot of fun! As with all places in the Arctic, polar and other bears are a risk. At all times, when in the field, you have to take certain items with you, such as bear spray and bear bangers. When you go further afield, an armed wildlife monitor is a legal requirement, and an option we availed of on two separate days. Other than spotting a grizzly while flying out to one site, we never saw anything of concern. Still, better safe than sorry!

Anywho, the first port of call was a site called Peninsula Point, located in Pingo National park, just west of Tuk (https://goo.gl/maps/kFFpc2etsCN2). We took off there in the 2 boats, and the water quickly turned choppy, which made the journey a fun one for those in the zodiac!

Bear Spray and Bear Bangers, a field safety necessity

 

Boats on the way to Peninsula Point

 

Peninsula Point was an awesome place to start! Multiple thaw slumps across different scales, some relatively stable while others are so active you hear the crashing and slushing of soil falling, hitting the ice and then joining the slow moving river of mud into the Arctic Ocean, every few seconds. In this area you have a variable thickness of massive ice, maxing out at about 10m thick, overlain by glacial till that can add another few to 20m in thickness, creating some impressive shear and unstable cliffs. The combination of melting ice and permafrost, all the soil and a nice slippery interface, results in periods of rapid erosion, with a huge mud pool forming in front of the fastest eroding sites and flowing into the ocean, forming a huge fan shaped mud lobe.

 

 

Cliff face, about 20m high on the right, 15m on the left

 

 

Fan shaped mud lobe from the thawing, eroding cliffs at Peninsula Point

 

There has essentially been no numerical modelling performed on thaw slump features along Arctic coastlines, which are becoming increasingly common, can be up to a kilometre long and extend hundreds of metres inland. So we knew this would be a key site for gathering useful data. A large portion of my PhD is dedicated to modelling (or attempting to model) thaw slumps, so we decided to dedicate a lot of time on this slump. This meant lots of laser scanning, SfM modelling from drones, the ground and helicopter, thermal imaging from the ground and helicopter, passive seismic testing, shear vane tests, active layer depth measurements, soil sampling and both short and long term time-lapse photography (more on all of that to come, when I’m back in the UK with a proper broadband connection!).

 

Peninsula Point cliffs and mud flow

 

Waterworld

 

Day 2 began with Vlad and I on the zodiac moving in through Tuktoyaktuk harbour. Tuk harbour is one of 2 regions in the western Canadian Arctic with water deep enough for shipping, and the only one that is accessible, hence the position of Tuktoyaktuk and its importance to Canada (the first road to Tuk will be completed this Autumn, finally providing a means of road based summer access).  The purpose of today’s trip was for Vlad to test a theory related to sedimentation flows and rates and their linkages to tidal cycles (which are typically just 40cm here), as well as doing some validation of the MODIS turbidity measurements, both in the Arctic Ocean and in the harbour area. So we journeyed from the mouth to the inner reaches of Tuk harbour, taking water samples, recording colour, CTD profiles (conductivity, temperature and depth), wind speed, solar radiation and more, at regular intervals. The weather was foggy and calm, making the work quite easy.

 

Myself and Vlad out in the zodiac

 

Further into the harbour, we came across an abandoned drilling platform that Vlad refers to as Waterworld, a relic from the oil and gas boom that occurred here in the 70s and 80s, when thousands of workers flooded the region, building, what are now, abandoned offices, makeshifts houses and hydrocarbon infrastructure. We later revisited “Waterworld” and had a look around inside, more pics to come, once more, when I have a stable connection!

 

Waterworld (movie and Tuk!)

 

In the afternoon we visited Tuk Island (https://goo.gl/maps/umVgwJc5dsH2), a narrow slice of land situated at the mouth of the harbour and an important monitoring site. Tuk Island provides a significant barrier to erosion of Tuktoyaktuk itself, but is eroding at such a rate that it may be largely gone in just 30 years. The north face of the slope consists of a long central portion with sandy slumps, covering a body of ice that likely stretches across the island, with a few small thaw slumps toward the eastern side, with low lying regions making up the west and east ends of the island. This was to be another important monitoring site, both for its importance to the town of Tuk itself, and the ease of access (5 minutes by boat) and the variable erosion mechanisms at play.

 

Eroding sand cliffs on Tuk Island 

 

Timelapse camera overlooking the Tuk Island north shore

My Name is Mud

For much of my work, such as soil tests, sampling, passive seismic, thermistor strings, etc., I had to dig… a lot. Big holes, small holes, wide holes, horizontal holes, boreholes. If nothing else from this trip, I will have gained great experience in digging and hand auguring holes! It was also quite muddy, very muddy in fact. It feels like it will be weeks before I can fully clean my hands! Sometimes you’ve gotta improvise too. Using a hand auger to drill through permafrost can be tiring, so having someone climb atop to add weight while others turn it was useful!

 

Collage of holes and auger work

Next time, in Tuktoyaktuk

So in the first two days we visited both of our primary sites, but still had half a dozen or so to check out, including some spectacular 30m tall coastal blocks that had collapsed into the sea and some, bright blue ice from the centre of an eroding pingo and lots of helicopter footage.

The Mackenzie Delta during a helicopter flight out to Pelly Island (we could later return through the Mackenzie delta by boat from Tuk to Inuvik, a spectacular 4.5 hour journey during sunset)

Comments

[Wade Smith]

Hey, Neven, let me educate you one time, and then I'll leave you alone.

you're guy made a personal attack on me, and I tore into him for a reason.

Your friend, "Dr" Jeff Masters doesn't know how this works, sorry to tell you that.

Take a look at this, and TRY to think objectively for a moment.

https://www.wunderground.com/hurricane/deadlyworld.asp

This is from Masters' site.

Look at that for a few minutes, and ask yourself, "What's wrong with this list?"

Well, I'll tell you what's wrong.

Only 3 of the cyclones were Global Warming cyclones.

21 of the Cyclones were Volcanic Winter Cyclones, including 3 of which happened in the same year, which was one of the 3 coldest years in world history.

12 of the Cyclones happened when Global Warming was too small to measure, in fact, they too actually happened when the Arctic Sea Ice was still INCREASING...

Educate yourself guy.

I'm done with you.

I'm way better at this than you have ever been at anything in your entire pathetic life.

[Neven]

Okay, all the best, Wade.

[Connie Quirk]

Missed the context to this unpleasant comment by WS, but his criticism doesn't make sense on the face of it. The list he links is, quite simply, of the deadliest cyclones in history.

So its purpose has nothing to do with the criticisms he makes.

I'll second Neven here: have a nice life, Wade.

[Sam]

Sam

Thank you for taking on this important work. Thank you too for sharing. I cannot even imagine how you will go about modeling slump and collapse in this sort of system. The complexities are huge. I don't want to take your time away from this work, so I am not looking for detailed answers, though I do have a couple of questions.

What do think are the key dominant parameters to model this?

Might this apply farther south in Siberia for tundra collapse there as well, or are other parameters likely to come into play?

Sam

[Susan Anderson]

In the process of trying to avoid saying what I think about that wholly gratuitous attack on Neven, I've opted out on commenting here several times. But it is deeply unfair to this fascinating article and amazing work, so here I am in my typical "fools rush in where angels fear to tread" clumping boots.

I had a little time to read through, look at the photographs, visit the map site, and in general reflect on this valuable work. There is something about the permafrost erosion that troubles us all, but that's no excuse for evading the issues.

Thank you again, Sam Hayes, with your mudwork and endurance and fascinating work!

[Paddy]

Dispiriting that the first response is of the kind it is, but it does touch on an interesting fact: deaths in natural disasters have dropped dramatically over the last eighty years or so, even as the number of people affected has grown; generally this is a result of our construction, planning, forecasting and response becoming more robust. See here for graphs of both deaths and people affected over time: https://ourworldindata.org/natural-catastrophes