»Ê¹ÚÌåÓý

Some people live close to work. Others need to take a car ride, two planes (one of which lands on skis on a frozen lake), and a snowmobile or skis to their destination – that’s what fieldtrip season looks like for Laura Thomson (Geography and Planning) and her students at »Ê¹ÚÌåÓý’s Ice, Climate, & Environment Laboratory (ICELab). Each Spring, they hop on a flight to Resolute Bay, Nunavut, and then another one to Axel Heiberg Island, where they work for three to four weeks managing one of Canada’s oldest glacier monitoring programs.

The original buildings of the historic McGill Arctic Research Station, built in 1960, still shelter the researchers that venture on this chilly trip. The remote location is exactly what they need to investigate the processes that drive glacier change and how it contributes to issues like the global sea-level rise observed in face of climate change.

Once on the top of the White Glacier in the high Arctic, Dr. Thomson’s team studies the many layers of snow that accumulate over time to sustain the region’s glaciers. On the lower parts of the glacier, with poles drilled five metres deep in the ice, they measure how snow and ice is melting year after year, as regional temperatures rise at rates more than two-times the global average. They also rely on more sophisticated instruments to assess the energy balance on the glacier, that is, the essential climate variables that contribute to snow and ice melt (incoming and outgoing radiation, temperature, wind speed, etc.).

ICELab PhD Candidate Wilson Cheung drilling on Turner Glacier, Auyuittuq National Park, Baffin Island, April 2022.

"Monitoring glaciers allows us to measure the difference between the amount of melt we have in the summer and the amount of snowfall we have in the winter," explains Dr. Thomson, who is also the Canada Research Chair in Integrated Glacier Monitoring Practices. "If you measure that for decades, you get a long-term sense of how these glaciers are changing, which indicates how the climate in that region is changing."

The physics of ice

Field-based measurements are one of the main components of Dr. Thomson’s glaciology research program, combined with remote sensing (that allows research to cover expansive regions) and computer models (which help the team to play with variables and see what would happen to the ice in different scenarios). Together, these three approaches allow for a broad understanding of glacier change through space and time.

"Glaciology is a slow game. In climate science, we try not to draw conclusions on results in less than 30 years."
– Dr. Laura Thomson