Schools

This is our last glacier day of the trip. We visited the terminal face of the Fox Glacier, where we again made a short GPS survey, keeping about 10 metres in front of the ice. A large part of the ice front is high and unstable, making it a very hazardous to go near. Following

We packed early, walked down to the road and drove up to Franz Josef for a look at the lower part of the glacier. Brian had two 4 metre ablation stakes which needed to be redrilled and inserted deeper in the ice. We also wanted to record the position of the terminus with the GPS.

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

Today we left the hut at 9 am and hiked 200m higher and then horizontally leftwards (North) to the glacier. The weather was fine and by midday we were roped up to step off the rock onto the ice. Initially this is a bit hazardous as the ice is undercut and could potentially break off

This morning we got up early to have a close up look at the Tasman Glacier Lake. The icebergs had moved a lot since my visit a month ago, but I could still recognise some of the bigger ones. We scrambled down the moraine below the viewpoint and walked along the edge of the lake

This trip to the glaciers involves 3 students from Raphael House Rudolf Steiner School in Lower Hutt. We are going to help with some glacier monitoring at the Brewster Glacier near Haast Pass, with a brief visit to Mount Cook village on the way, and a short stop at Fox and Franz Josef Glaciers on