The photos above show how McCall Glacier has responded to a changing climate over of the past 45 years. What is the cause of this retreat? Is there less snow? Is there more melt? Have air temperatures gotten warmer or the skies less cloudy? What weather patterns could account for changes such as these changes? What do these changes say about the role of Arctic weather in the global climate system, in the past, present and future? These are the types of questions that our project seeks to answer.

These pages describe the setting and history of McCall Glacier and its neighbors, an overview of our research, and some of our results. Follow the links at left for more details. Click here to see a movie which morphs between the two images above. To see a movie I made using EarthSLOT that gives a nice overview of our research here, please choose one of the following links based on your internet connection speed: fast, medium, slow.

In brief, McCall Glacier, located in what is now the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, has the longest history of scientific observation for any U.S. Arctic Glacier. These observations began as part of the International Geophysical Year in 1957-58 (pre-dating the Refuge) and our project will continue this record from 2003 until the International Polar Year in 2007. Our field research is geared towards measuring everything which may change over time, including mass balance, ice volume, ice temperature, ice velocities, bed properties, albedo, and local weather. We have conduct two field campaigns each year: one in late May and one in mid-August. In all of the years of observation, including ours, the glacier has been losing ice at an increasing rate. This loss likely began around 1890, based on ice extents, lichenometry, and a variety of external information that suggests that a signficant change in climate began around that time. As our most detailed time-series of mass balance is over thirty years long now, we hope to begin looking for correlations between this record and the well-documented climate patterns that now exist for the Arctic.

We have published three peer-reviewed papers on this research thus far, and have about five more in preparation:

Nolan, Matt, Anthony Arendt, Bernhard Rabus, and Larry Hinzman, 2005. Volume change of McCall Glacier, Arctic Alaska, from 1956 to 2003. Annals of Glaciology, 42: 409-416.

Frank Pattyn, Matt Nolan, and Bernhard Rabus, 2005. Localized basal motion of a polythermal Arctic glacier: McCall Glacier, Alaska, U.S.A. Annals of Glaciology, 40: 47-51.

Klok, Lisette, Matt Nolan, and Michiel van den Broeke, 2006. Analysis of meteorological data and the surface energy balance of McCall Glacier, Alaska. Journal of Glaciology, 51 (174): 451-461.

This is a nice popular-press paper reviewing the history of McCall Glacier research.

Weller, Gunter, Matt Nolan, Gerd Wendler, Carl Benson, Keith Echelmeyer and Norbert Untersteiner, 2007. Fifty years of McCall Glacier research: from the International Geophysical Year, 1957-58 to the International Polar Year, 2007-08. Arctic 60 (1).

This research is support by the National Science Foundation's Freshwater Initiative (OPP-ARCSS), which is a contribution to the inter-agency SEARCH program. Our grant is titled "Detection and attribution of changes in the hydrologic regimes of the Mackenzie, the Kuparuk and the Lena River Basins", funded from 2003 to 2008, with Larry Hinzman, Matt Nolan, Kenji Yoshikawa, and Doug Kane as Principle Investigators. The main web page for the Freshwater Initiative can be found here. This project is also a part of the endorsed IPY project Glaciodyn.

Any opinions or findings expressed in these web pages are those of the PIs and not necessarily those of National Science Foundation.