Confessions of a glaciology PhD student
Amusing excerpts from the diary of second-year glaciology PhD student
I have come to the end of the second year of my PhD this January. It's been a great year, and I have been recording a lot of it in my work diary. For nostalgia's sake, and to celebrate the calamities and bizarre situations experienced, I thought I would share some of my more humorous diary snippits from the past year.
Wednesday 22nd April 2015 'It's been a day of procrastination. Not much work done. I think it started when my Matlab script wouldn't work - "Matrix dimensions must agree"... but they do agree?!?!'
Friday 31st July 2015 [In Svalbard] 'So today went well - I reprogrammed the camera timers, accommodated for the irregular trigger cable, and also made a new camera box eyebrow... out of an ice cream tub.'
Wednesday 5th August 2015 [In Svalbard] 'Today we packed up the boat and sailed over to Tunabreen. We got there around midday after a rocky patch which left me bed bound, eyes tight shut and concentrating on not being sick. We got there quite early and knew we would have a lot of daylight so set off to the glacier to begin scouting sites for the strain meters. It took us ages to find a suitable site as the crevasse field stretched much further upglacier than expected. Once we found a site, we drilled a marker pole so we could find it again and fashioned a flag out of my long-johns. They looked magnificent.'
The Viking Explorer moored in a calm area of Tempelfjorden, Svalbard (August, 2016). The infamous long-john flag still flies on Tunabreen to this day as a sacrifice to the glacial gods
Monday 18th August 2015 [In Svalbard] 'Got to Tempelfjorden, went to take water samples with Kristin, lost her secchi disk in the fjord. Fan-bloody-tastic.'
Wednesday 2nd September 2015 [In Svalbard] 'Back from a big day on Kronebreen. All the cameras were still there, a fox chewed through only one of the cables, and we spotted a herd of polar bears/arctic foxes/arctic hares (yes, in that order of suspects) which turned out to be ptarmigans after thorough investigation.'
Thursday 3rd September 2015 [In Svalbard] 'We changed the SD card in camera 2 today, which I'd switched timers to take one photo every three seconds. It was very adrenaline pumping as I had to run out of the helicopter [whilst the rotor blades were still spinning] and change the SD card as quickly as possible. My heart was pounding and I kept thinking "Time means money. BE QUICK." I ran back to the helicopter in good time to find our pilots taking a selfie. They obviously weren't as concerned.'
Wednesday 23rd September 2015 [In Svalbard] 'Today has been good. Very productive. I think I have got my [AG-347/847] practical exercise sorted. I managed to resolve the problem with DEM importing - if I ever read this diary back looking for this info, remember that Pointcatcher needs cartesian coordinates. CARTESIAN, GOD DAMMIT.'
Me at camera site 8b, Kronebreen, Svalbard (May 2015). Photo credit: Heidi Sevestre
Thursday 8th October 2015 'I have Taylor Swift to thank for my productivity today.'
Wednesday 4th November 2015 'Today I worked on some more Python code - the script can now change image filenames to the EXIF timestamp... ish... well... it can nearly do that.'