Yesterday was a bad weather day which we spent mainly in the hut. Brian Anderson joined us in the evening. He is a glaciologist at the Antarctic Research Centre at Victoria University Wellington and has been studying the Brewster Glacier for several years.
This morning we hiked across to the glacier again. While Brian went to check the stream gauge, I took the students along the front of the glacier with a GPS to mark its position. We kept a few metres of clearance from the ice as there were places where large blocks had fallen quite recently.
Then we all roped up and walked the length of the glacier to look for the highest ablation stakes in the network. A couple were missing, but number 18 – right at the top, was there, melted out by 5.2 metres, a record for this altitude. On the way down we gathered as many stakes as we could. They will be redeployed again in the spring. It was fun trying to negotiate our way around the crevasses. By 6pm we were again off the ice.
