Anne Randall (CAS’22) was accepted to the Juneau Icefield Research Program in summer 2021. She is skiing here at Echo Glacier, an area between the glacier and a mountain where the ice has melted around the sides. Photo credit: Holly Harris

Climate Science

On Alaska’s Glaciers, Life Is Harsh—and So Is the Reality of Climate Change

BU undergraduate researcher Anne Randall spent three months living on the ice and tracking how glaciers are melting

Imagine living on a glacier, in a remote wilderness area, for three months straight. That’s exactly what BU undergraduate student Anne Randall did over summer 2021 in order to collect ice samples, study the shifting landscape of Alaska’s ice fields, and learn how climate change is impacting the world’s glaciers. 

As one of 30 students from across the United States in the Juneau Icefield Research Program (JIRP), Randall, a senior in BU’s College of Arts & Sciences, and her peers had a steep learning curve to adjust to life on the ice. She did not know how to downhill or backcountry ski before arriving in Alaska and traveling to the glacial area on Juneau’s outskirts—or how to safely traverse miles of snow-covered mountains and glaciers pocketed with crevasses and other dangers, for that matter. But by the end, many blisters from worn down ski boots later, Randall had learned to thrive in the extreme environment. 

“It’s very different to read about [glaciers] than [it is] to see them in real life,” says Randall, who is an earth and environmental science major on the climate track. On a trip to Svalbard, Norway, in 2019, she became fascinated with the cryosphere—areas of Earth covered in ice—after she saw a glacier for the first time. As she watched from the deck of a boat, a large chunk of ice broke off the glacier, crashing into the ocean. Shortly after returning from Svalbard, she searched for undergraduate research programs to study glaciers—and was then accepted into JIRP.

Life on the ice field, though wet and bitterly cold, was touched with moments of natural wonder and beauty, she says. The professors leading the JIRP group would sometimes pause their lectures so the class could watch spectacular sunsets painting the sky. And as the group ascended past the tree line on their way to the first base camp, called Camp 17, they looked down and saw bald eagles circling in the valleys below. 

“Full disclosure, I am not a rock climber,” Randall says. “It was absolutely incredible to break the tree line for the first time and start walking on this ridgeline of rock.” 

To prepare for the many miles of climbing and hiking—the first trek gained 4,000 feet in altitude over seven miles—Randall, who is originally from Pennsylvania, trained by running up and down large staircases in Brookline during the months prior to the trip and followed a training program JIRP leaders suggested to accepted students. 

The JIRP program lasted from early June to mid-August, and the majority of Randall’s time was spent among three glaciers: Lemon Creek Glacier, Vaughan Lewis Glacier, and Taku Glacier, which is the deepest and thickest temperate glacier in the world. 

Glaciers, often called rivers of ice, are made up of tons of snow compacting and transforming into thick ice over hundreds or thousands of years. Because of their huge size and weight, glaciers slowly creep along Earth’s surface, sculpting landscapes as they move. (Boston was at one point, thousands of years ago, covered in a thick layer of slow-moving glacial ice that created places like Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard.) 

Left: Randall is in a crevasse on the Vaughan Lewis Glacier near a field camp for JIRP called Camp 18. Students got to repel down into the crevasse from this site. Right: These three skiers, Randall in the lowest position on the slope, were a part of the research group measuring the position of stakes placed on the Little Vaughan Lewis Glacier. Photo courtesy of Anne Randall.

Scientists have used glaciers to gain deeper understanding of Earth’s climatic history, and as global temperatures rise from human activity, changes in the world’s glaciers serve as crucial indicators for understanding the current pace of global warming. Melting glaciers are the biggest cause of sea level rise, and for over 30 years experts have found that glaciers are increasingly losing ice, rather than gaining, because of hotter temperatures. 

At JIRP, professors and students from across the country take part in the annual research journey to add to the growing body of research on how these glaciers are changing. Randall’s class was the first one held during the COVID-19 pandemic. Upon arrival, the researchers separated into groups of four to quarantine for the first two weeks, test for COVID-19, and ensure that each team member was in good health before setting out for their research sites on ice field—accessible only by a helicopter that could take seven days to arrive depending on the weather. For that reason, the students also learned backcountry safety, mountaineering, and navigational skills as crucial parts of their introductory lessons. 

“It gets eerie the farther you move into the ice field,” Randall says. “Because there’s nothing to support life out there…it feels almost otherworldly.” Despite the harsh and desolate environment, to Randall’s surprise, delicate and iridescently plumed hummingbirds would occasionally fly by on their southward migration paths. 

A remote camp on the ice field. Photo courtesy of Anne Randall.

“It’s incredible to see the organisms that have adapted to survive there,” she says, such as the heather plants, types of shrubs that grow in the rocky soil between the ice sheets, able to survive being completely covered in snow. And over the months of being isolated from anyone else, Randall and the group had bonded over the various challenges—like digging a hole into the snow to expose a layer of granular ice called firn—and all there is to learn when living in an unfamiliar place. 

She and the JIRP crew grew accustomed to getting around primarily on skis or hiking in ski boots, oftentimes with ice picks handy for scrambling and various types of fieldwork. Randall spent much of her summer setting out stakes with GPS locators to track the position of the glacier and measure seasonal snow accumulation on certain parts of the different glaciers. 

“The glaciers in Alaska are going to be affected by climate change very, very rapidly, and so the rate of melting is really important to understand,” she says. Measuring glaciers using remote sensing technology, including satellite imagery, is the most common way researchers track velocity of glacier movement, she explains. Part of the project was making sure the stakes on the ground matched the satellite data. 

This is one of several glacial lakes Randall and the JIRP crew came across on the glaciers, all varying in size and depth, and some lakes even had icebergs in them. Photo courtesy of Anne Randall.

At the last camp where the crew spent time, Randall witnessed a lot of active ice falling off the glacier, a thrilling part of the JIRP experience. “The sound of the glacier cracking and breaking was a lot like thunder,” she says. “I would sit on the rocks and watch the ice fall.” 

These days, during her final year at BU, Randall is more likely to be found near water than ice, studying eelgrass beds along the coast of Massachusetts. Eelgrass is a type of seaweed that buffers flooding and provides a home to small marine animals. Randall is earning a minor in marine science, but hopes to eventually return to the cryosphere to visit other glaciers that are under threat from climate change. 

Despite the fact that most people live far away from Arctic ice fields, “there’s a lot that we do that directly impacts the glaciers and influences global warming,” she says. 

One of the biggest lessons Randall took away from the JIRP experience was the importance of communicating the urgency of climate science to people who don’t understand its complexities. “It’s difficult to try to get across this complex, long history of changes in the environment,” she says, “and how we’re deviating from what is normal, and also to get people to believe you.”

But we have to try, she says.