#15 Thursday, March 6th, 2008: Kyun-In Huh

I interviewed a woman from the Glacier Dynamics group today. This is what I found out about her and the group:
• Kyun is a 1st year student in her PhD for geology
• Kyun’s goal is to investigate the mass balance change in west Greenland
• Kyun has been with this group since the last glacier dynamics group
• One pixel is 30 m
• Kyun is trying to develop a procedure to map the Little Ice age trimlines and terminal moraine around Jakobshavn
• ASTER (Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer)
• Launched by NASA
• Is a instrument attached to satellite Terra
• Has 50 m resolution
• ASTER is free at a institutional level
• Trimzone: an area between a glacier and soil.
• Trimzones are usually light colored and have no vegetation.
• Vegetation is calculated by volume
• The existing vegetation at the glacial part of Jakobshavn are lichen and tundra
• Kyun has never been Jakobshavn
• The height of the valley is 30 meter
• In the 1800s the two peninsulas of Jakobshavn were jointed
• NASA funded Kyun’s models under the condition that all data and models would be available to them.
• Kyun’s research developed her 145 page masters thesis
• The height and area of glaciers are being depleted
• Kyun created moraine maps, which shows the movement of glaciers over time
• Moraine maps were created by aerial photos from ASTER
• To create maps multiple pictures need to be pieced together
• ASTER cover is 60 km by 60 km
• The Peruvian mountains sections they are studying are six times larger then the Jakobshavn area that Kyun is studying.
• Kyun is traveling to Peru in the summer
• Kyun and the group are going to map the Quelccaya ice cap with a GPS system from a plane. They are also going to use a ground penetrating radar that tells how thick the ice is