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Title
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Jay Fleisher (Part 2)
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Description
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SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor and long–time Chair of the Earth Sciences Department, Jay Fleisher began his career in oil exploration but soon changed, his direction, earned his PhD and arrived at Oneonta in the late l960’s. His first experience on the Juneau ice field guided him into glacial research in Alaska, primarily at the Bering Glacier. His research involved important discoveries about glacial surges and was in effect an early exploration of the intense interest now in climate change. He continued his research activities in retirement and from 2010 to 2013 served as the Director of the Juneau Icefield Research Program
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Contributor (Interviewer)
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Alan Donovan
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Date of interview
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2019-01-19
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Duration (Extent)
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50M22S
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Type
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Sound
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Subject
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educator
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Transcript
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duration:"01:12:10"
January 11, 2019
Alan Donovan – AD
Jay Fleisher – JF
AD: Greetings, once again Kitchen Table Conversations. My guest today is Doctor Jay Fleischer, SUNY distinguished teaching professor, and I guess mostly you'd call yourself a glacial geologist.
JF: Yeah, when asked ‘what kind of geology do you do?’ Glacial geology is usually the one that identifies me.
AD: Okay, good. So after graduate school, you got started way down in New Mexico.
JF: I did. I did. It was a rather interesting start in New Mexico too, because the last year I was in Chapel Hill working on my masters at the University of North Carolina, all the oil companies were interviewing all the graduate students and making very, very tempting offers to have you join them. They were doing a lot of exploration in North America globally, actually, so, and I interviewed and I thought, wow, this is a real, this is a real exciting thing. They told me the nature of the work and it sounded wonderful. So I took a job with them and my first assignment was, after finishing my degree, my first assignment was in Farmington, NM. Now, I had never been to that part of the world.
AD: Oh, the Shiprock
JF: Near Shiprock. Yes, very much near the town of Shiprock, and the actual rock called Shiprock. And I had never been there before. I wasn't really sure what to expect, and I actually bought a gun and carried it under the seat of my car.
AD: You were talking about that now,
JF: Because I was concerned that my pregnant wife might somehow be in some difficult situation, I might need to use this thing at least as
AD: And now you can tell the story.
JF: Now I can tell the story, yeah. So I arrive in Farmington, went to work. Standard uh, Standard Oil and they put me in a program for oil exploration. And in order to, and that they describe to me the nature of the work that we do during the exploration, the actual hardware and equipment and techniques and so on, and I knew what area I was going to be going to ahead of time, and I knew the generally the nature of the work that was going to be done. So before I even left Chapel Hill, I went to the library and familiarized myself with as much as I could about the details of the geology of the Four Corners area, or Farmington sulcate. And then when I got on the job I realized that all of that information in the library is old old stuff. If you really want to know what's going on today, you go to the to the vault of the oil company where they keep their records, and of course it's in a vault because they don't want to share this with anybody except people are wanting to pay for it.
AD: Kay,
JF: So I got a real education on the nature of the geology, but the most exciting part was they would they would send me out in the field with a team of four or five other geologists to work equipment that detected traps in the bedrock below the surface, and these are traps for oil and I had never done any of this work before, although I was familiar with the seismic aspect of the work. From being the chap in in charge of the seismic center at the University of North Carolina, where we record earthquakes every day and report them to the US Coast and Geodetic Survey and so on. Anyway, I was sort of familiar with the nature of the equipment and found it to be fascinating. It was it was totally engrossing. I had the greatest time working with those people. They were paying me an obscene amount of money to have all of this fun and learn all of this new stuff. And then my first daughter, Evelyn was born in Farmington and I stood there looking through the glass of the nursery at 5 little Navajo babies and Evelyn and I thought wow, this is this really is a different culture out here. I'm going to learn more about the nature of what it's like to grow up as a child in this kind of dri- this kind of society and this kind of region. So I began to check and I found out my boss - who had been with the company for 15 years - had been transferred about every three or four years, and even the district geophysicist was transferred every seven or eight years and I decided that it was just too much variety for little Evelyn. So that that would she she would be sent to many different schools and have to make many different friends in many different places. I decided there had to be more stability in this so I took a leave of absence to go back to graduate school for a PhD so that I could return in oil research instead of exploration because the research branch had only two offices and it was a much more stable lifestyle. Well, I got back to graduate school which is at Washington State University and my first semester there met with my committee and an advisor, and set up a research program that was in the launch me, on a goal of finding out how the earth makes oil, and I thought that was so exciting. And to sort of fill in for the first semester there I took a course, my first ever in glacial geology from a very dynamic guy who took us on a field trip one weekend to the Wallowa Mountains of Oregon and we spent the whole weekend up in the mountains and this was my first exposure to 10, 11,000 feet and and the subject of glacial Alpine glacial geology. Wow, I I just couldn't I couldn't believe how familiar it all seemed and how comfortable it was to me. And when I got back to Pullman, I talked to my advisor and told him I think I want to change my research subject from glacial from oil - the origin of oil - to glacial geology, and this would make a major shift. And he, terrific guy, said to me, ‘Jay, follow your bliss, if that's really what you want to do.’ So off I went and did a PhD dissertation in the Sierra Nevada of California on multiple glacial geology events in a segment of that mountain range. Well, I finished my degree, it was a three year program. Some of the guys had been there for four or five years, or some of them - none of them any less than three - and finished with, I think there were four other fellows that finished when I did and they all wanted to go where the money was, so they went to the oil industry. I wanted to be in academia because it was the lifestyle of academia that was more important to me than the money.
AD: And also research and instead of exploration.
JF: Yeah, I choose my own research.
AD: Yeah,
JF: I I wasn't being dictated in that regard, so I began looking for a job and there were several openings for a geologist with the background and glacial geology. And I chose the northeast because my wife’s family at the time was living in New York, upstate New York state. My family was in New York state, and I decided with a little grandchild this would be good, close to the to the grandparents and so on. And I took the job at SUNY Oneonta. I really didn't know very much about SUNY Oneonta. Had a telephone interview for the job and was offered the job, but I wasn't comfortable with a telephone interview, I wanted to see the place and meet the people and see the nature of the campus and so on. I came in on a visit and the people I spent most of my time with during that visit were the people in geology, as opposed to the other sciences and and the campus was very appealing at the time, and all of these fellows who were in the geology group and Earth Science department were just wonderful people. All dedicated to doing a good job with students, Undergraduates in the classroom, and I decided I'd I'd come to work here. Well, I took the job.
AD: What year was that?
JF: That was in 1967, the fall of 67, and I remember before I left for the job interview, my research director in Pullman, WA told me, Jay, whatever they offer, you tell them no. And I said: but Frank, I really want this job, and no Jay, tell them no. So here I am in an interview with the fellow who was chairing all of the sciences and mathematics at the time, Emery Will, and at the end of the day after the full day interview, we sat in his office and he made a formal offer. And I thought, oh, this is wonderful! They they they really, I like this place. I like the people I would work with. I liked SUNY. I liked the idea that SUNY was growing. But Frank told me not to take the job, so until, on the 1st offer, so I mustered up all of the courage I could and I said to Emery, well I'm sorry but I just don't think that that's going to be attractive enough for me to come. And he said, give me a few minutes and he left the office, supposedly to call Royal Netzer to check it out, but I knew better than that. He came back in 15 or 20 minutes and said OK Jay we can up the offer to X number of bucks and I said, oh Frank, you, wonderful advice! Thanks Frank, and I took the job. Well, to get to the chase on this, I enjoyed the courses that I was asked to teach, not just the ones in my specialty, but other introductory courses as well. I liked the idea that my colleagues were all dedicated to what they were doing. They all had their oars in the water and they were all pulling in the same direction. No backbiting, no controversies. It was a wonderful place to be, but I thought: do I really want to be in an undergraduate institution. Should I be in a PhD granting university? So, to test that, the first three years that I was here I took summer jobs at major PhD granting institutions; Oregon State, University of British Columbia, big places, to get an idea what it was like from the other side of the desk. And each time I returned to Oneonta, it felt so comfortable. Not just the campus and the academic atmosphere here and my colleagues, but the town of Oneonta was a wonderful place to raise children, and by that time I had a second daughter six months old and I thought ‘this is it. I'm staying.’ And I just simply made the decision. This is, this place is going to get my full attention and my full effort, and I never, never regretted giving it, making that decision.
AD: And you also proved the point that significant research can exist at other than PhD granting universities.
JF: You bet! I thought that a PhD institution would keep me in the research loop, but as you just pointed out I realized once I got here there was enough academic freedom to permit me to do research as well, and I liked that idea a lot. Well, as fate would have it, consistent with this notion that I wanted to start research, comes a flyer through the mail. A hard copy through the mail advertising the Juneau Icefield Research program on the Juneau Icefield in southeast Alaska. And I thought, ah, this is my opportunity to work with active glaciers, so I applied. It was an NSF supported program for postdocs. There were 16 of us who were in the program, and we we spent eight weeks on the Juneau Icefield traversing the Icefield, so there was an expeditionary aspect to it that was all new to me, and I learned so much about myself just as I did about the science. But there were also research projects going on across the Icefield that we could - we meaning the other, and as uh supportive people - could could participate in. And I realized that this this is not only the subject that I like, this is also the environment that I would really like to work.
AD: And this was your first time really kind of living on a glacier for a period of time.
JF: That's correct, that's right. Been on glaciers before, but never had anything more than a day experience. This was an opportunity to live within the glacial environment, and I I'll never forget the day that I it, all of a sudden it occurred to me. I looked around at all of the alpine peaks surrounding the Juneau Icefield, all of which had glaciers dripping off of them, coalescing to form the icefield and I thought to myself, ‘ this is what the Adirondacks looked like 14,000 years ago. Pay attention, Jay, pay attention. This is a snapshot of the past.’ Well, it turned out to be a lot more than that, actually. The the opportunities that presented themselves allowed me to apply the active glacial environment to central New York state, which had been free of ice for 14 to 18,000 years and draw some analogies between what's what's going on in the active environment and the place where the ice had long since been gone.
Well, that led to my research in the local central New York area, led to being asked to join a group of 6 individuals working with the New York State Geologic Survey - summers so it didn't interfere with the academic calendar - and the six individuals were selected from different parts of New York state because they had in different expertise and different parts of the state and the project goal was to make a map of New York state depicting all of the glacial deposits. Well, this this was a lot of fun. I would spend four to six weeks in the summer traveling through New York state, mapping the glacial geology and it was fortuitous that on a particular excursion to a region just south of Rochester in western New York, there was a setting of glacial geology that seemed to puzzle not just me, but other members of the research team, including an individual from Syracuse University who was sort of the the senior member of our group, Ernie Muller, who had been publishing things in the journals while the rest of us were still in graduate school. And even even Ernie was was puzzled by what we saw and just couldn't imagine, couldn't couldn't reconstruct what kind of a glacial situation could produce this. Well, I presented the results of this conundrum at a geologic conference, and a fella came up to me afterwards
and said Jay, what you guys need is a modern analog. You have to find a place where the glacial geology is - that affected New York state - is still going on.
AD: So you, you were studying, you knowy the after of the glacier, so to speak, and you had to find a place before, where the glacier was.
JF: That's right,
AD: Glacier was,
JF: That's correct. And it had to be a glacier that would simulate the Laurentide Ice Sheet, which is the glacial mass that influenced the entire northeast and and Great Lakes area.
AD: So what what would you be looking for for a simulation? I mean size or activity? Or what
JF: Two things: one it had to be very broad across its front, and it had to be a glacier that within the glacier nomenclature we would refer to as a temperate glacier, meaning the warmest that glaciers can be and still be a glacier. There are glaciers in the Arctic region that are called polar glaciers, and they're glaciers and Alpine regions that are called temperate glaciers, and there are some gradations in between
AD: And how broad at the base would you would you consider
JF: At the terminus?
AD: Yeah,
JF: Oh, it would have to be, as much as 100 to 200 miles along the front of of the Laurentide Ice Sheet in New York state. But even glaciers of that scape – scope - and scale have individual lobes involved and may cover hundreds of miles totally. But individual lobes could be 10, 15, or 20 miles and along their front. Well, I began searching the literature and came across an aerial photograph of a glacier in Alaska. The Bering Glacier named for Vitus Bering but nowhere near the Bering Sea. It's in the central coastal region of of Alaska and the aerial photograph was taken by a member of the US Geological Survey 20 years before. Well, I looked into this and found out that the individual who took that photograph actually did photographs of every glacier on the West Coast of North America, including Alaska from the Olympic Peninsula in Washington, all the way up to the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska, and he did this in a photo flight, and whenever the weather wasn't suitable at any particular location, he would move on to the next. And so as it turns out, this one photograph I saw was one in a whole sequence of photographs depicting the whole scope of the Bering glacier and and I needed to see those photographs. Well, as fate would have it, the individual who took that photograph was on a field trip that I took in Alaska and I asked him one day, I have a copy of the photograph you did at the Bering glacier, but it's only one of the whole flight line, where where are the others in the flight line? And he said they're in my living room. And I said, well, how do I get to see them? And he looked at me like I just asked the dumbest question in the world and he said to me, come to my living room. So I did. He lived in Olympia, WA and so I flew out, spent three days looking at the rest of those photographs and many others, and found him to be an intriguing individual. He's actually brilliant, knew so much about life. I know I could learn a lot from this chap, and that he had the right photos. Anyway, he provided what was necessary for me to decide to put a small research team together to go to the Bering glacier to observe the modern analog of what would have taken place in Batavia and New York.
AD: Now, The Bering glacier is near Prince William Sound uh, am I am I right?
JF: It is. It's about 200 miles to the southeast of Prince William Sound and
AD: Okay …. … sounds very big.
JF: It's enormous and on the south shore, or the southern coastal area, of Prince William Sound, well there are many fishing villages on Prince William Sound, but one of them is Cordova, and Cordova was about I'd say 100 miles or so, from the Bering Glacier and it was the the the location where the Prince William Sound Science Center is located, the forest service had a research location there. It was a fishing village, but there was this research component related to that whole community. And I decided that would be a good staging area to do the research at the Bering. So, of course I had to put a research team together and I did. It included Ernie Muller, the chap from Syracuse who was on the mapping team in New York state, the fellow who put the mapping team together who was with the New York State Geologic Survey, Don Kedwell. The other two members of the group included one of Ernie's students, a PhD student who was new teaching in Plattsburgh, and one of my graduate students who was working on a master’s degree here at Oneonta. And the four of us went to the Bering glacier, knowing absolutely nothing about what we were going to encounter on the ground at that location in this wilderness,
AD: How did you prepare for that?
JF: Well, I I did as much as I could to get myself physically ready with the right uh, right gear and the Juneau Icefield experience was tremendously helpful in this regard. Actually, if it weren't for that experience I don't think I would have had enough confidence to be able to put together a research team to go to the Bering. And so, we we were going to go to the Bering glacier to solve a specific problem, answer a specific set of questions. Well, as you might, and so we put together all of the equipment we would be necessary to do this. We all met in Cordova. Everybody had their own personal gear, I had the other gear for camping and whatever research we were going to be doing. And we chartered a local bush pilot and his airplane - a Beaver, which is like a pickup truck for small airplanes. - We loaded all of our gear and the four of us in that airplane and before we actually left, we looked at a map on the wall in the dispatch office of this fellow’s operation and I pointed out where we wanted to go, but the map was about 8 years old and the glacier has since retreated over that period of time, and we were going to go to a place that was actually shown to be under the glacier at the time that map was made. But since the glacier had retreated and exposed an area that was illustrated on my aerial photographs, I knew this is where we wanted to go. But the bush pilot looking at the map said, Jay, I'm not sure where we're going to land when we get there. I've never been to this before. I've flown up and down the coast on mail runs, taking mail to to various camps, logging camps, and and things like that, but I've never been to this specific location. Do you know if there's there's going to be a place where I'm going to be able to land this airplane? It was on floats, so I showed them the air photos and said, yeah, there's this lake out in front of the glacier. Let's let's load up and and go and we'll check it out.
AD: And what was the year that you were first going there?
JF: That was 1989.
AD: Okay, So your your experience with the Bering glacier goes over a 20 year period?
JF: Well yeah, the actually the last summer that I was at the Bering Glacier doing field work was in 20-oh-nine. So it was a 2 decade span of time, and I never anticipated it would be 2 decades there. But every time we went, we answered the question we went to answer and then found a dozen other questions that needed answering, which drew us back, but that's the nature of the research.
AD: Kind of longitudinal research. I mean, you have to stretch it out
JF: Well, it stretched out in the sense that only that once we answered the objective for any one summer we also realize that there are objectives that needed to be dealt with the following summer, so yeah, it got stretched out to the next year and then that did the same thing to the following year and. Well, I just wanted to comment that this location we're going to was accessible only by a plane on floats. There was no place there you could land a plane on wheels and the lake that we were going to land on and then taxi up to the front of the glacier had icebergs in it, that had calved off the front of the glacier and nobody had ever landed a flip - a float plane in that lake before, so the water depth wasn't known and I have to hand it to the pilot: he was willing to take the chance that it wasn't going to be too shallow and end up tipping over or he was willing to guts it out. So, we went and we landed this airplane on the lake, taxied up to the front of the glacier which was a wall of ice about 10 feet high, 8 to 10 feet high. We unloaded our gear onto the glacier, and the pilot was getting back in his airplane when I said to him: before you leave for Cordova, there are two things I'd like you to do. Please fly around and make sure you didn't let us out on a big iceberg, that would serve us no purpose whatsoever. And secondly, please tell somebody where you put us, because you're the only guy in the world who knows where we are.
AD: And that was before the time of accessible GPS too, wasn't more or less.
JF: That’s correct. We had no GPS equipment at all. He didn't have any in his plane. The military was using GPS, but that was that was it, not not not civilians. So as anticipated, we found things that offered solutions to the problem that we went to solve, but then we also found things that deserved further attention. Well, this went on now, for five years.
AD: Summertime only I’m assuming.
JF: Oh, yeah, just just in the summers.
AD: Winter I take it wouldn't be, wouldn't be feasible.
JF: Well, as it turns out after after about five years, an event occurred that led to something very special that they'd lead then led to an NSF grant. That was a four-season grant, so I did go back with some of the colleagues not just in the summer, but in the fall, and then again in January, then again in March. But the January trip was never, we never landed and set up a camp. We did a photo flight, found what we could from the air and we we didn't set up camp. Camp involved tents, Coleman stoves, canned food, base - Very very basic stuff. So basic, that initially we weren't even sure what our water source was going to be and any rate, the camping part of this had a lot of gusto involved. The science part of this was very very rewarding. We were seeing things, recording documenting things that were not yet in the literature, and so it was exciting that every time we went back, I had the feeling that there was a chance to discover something that I never knew before, nobody ever knew before.
AD: What were some of your unique discoveries, being acquainted with the glacier?
JF: Well, uh, first. I should say that in addition to to working on the glacier proper, the glacier itself, we were looking also at the processes going on along the front of the glacier by glacial deposition and erosion, and by meltwater deposition and erosion, and in the lakes, deposition. So there was a multi multi-phase type, multi-topic type research project and the kinds of things that we we discovered that we hadn't known before was how fast the surface of the glacier was melting down. At what rate, from one year to the next, was it retreating back? By what mechanism does the melt water that forms on the surface of the glacier end up coming out of the front of the glacier? It's just a whole myriad of topics that related to what we would call glacial activity,
AD: Including the movement of the glacier forward.
JF: Well, this glacier was moving, was just sort of creeping along. By that I mean it was a broad lobe of ice at the end of a glacier of locked within a valley that came out of the Chugach Mountains. And once that glacier in the valley got to the base of the mountains, it spread out. And it spread out into what we called Piedmont lobe, the Piedmont being the region at the base of the mountains, and our research was on one segment of this Piedmont lobe, not the full 30 mile width of the glacier in that Piedmont lobe, but one segment of it. And as the ice left the valley, it favored one part of that Piedmont lobe over a period of a year or two, and then it would shift in favor another part, and then shift in favor another one. So the whole lobe over period of a decade grew, but it grew in bits and segments and the 1st four years we were there, we were not working on a part of the glacier that the main trunk glacier was feeding, so it wasn't actively flowing in our in our direction, so to speak, until the summer of 1993. When we flew out to the glacier in in order to get to our camp’s location, where we had set up in the past and - the first year we set up on the glacier. The second year, we realized we could set up on on a land mass on the ice was retreating from and it was free of free of vegetation because the ice had retreated from there in the last decade, and plants hadn't yet gotten established, so it was a great place for a campsite. We were on land instead of on the ice, which was sort of like moving to the tropics from when you sleep on the glacier versus sleeping on the lands. World of difference. Anyway, we we flew out to the glacier in the summer of 93 and in order to get to our campsite we had to fly across the Piedmont lobe and a segment of the main glacier coming out of the mountains, and we noticed that there was a bizarre crevasse pattern that didn't exist the year before. And so we took a little detour route, and we flew up the glacier bit and what we saw told us that the glacier was in the process of surging, meaning this glacier is now moving fast, much faster than it would normally. And indeed when we did our measurements that summer, we found that the glacier was advancing toward our campsite at a rate of about 10 meters a day, so it's at one end of your living room in the morning and the other end of your living room in the evening.
AD: Now, question is. How does how does this relate to the fact that it's also melting?
JF: In, as in all advancing glaciers, they they flow faster forward than they melt at their terminus. For retreating glaciers, they're melting faster at their terminus than the ice is being replaced by flow and under present climate conditions, most glaciers are losing more mass by melting than they're getting by new snow being added in their area of accumulation. So, but instead of measuring a creeping glacier, we were now able to measure a surge in glacier
AD: and you said 30 meters
JF: a day! - 10 meters a day - about 30 feet a day. That's that is astronomic in glacier movement.
AD: What would the normal movement of a glacier be,
JF: Perhaps 3 feet a day?
AD: OK,
JF: Now that's the movement of the ice,
AD: Yeah,
JF: But whether it's advancing that much at the end or not depends on what the what the climate is there. It could be melting 3 feet 3 feet a day as well as advancing and three feet a day, in which case the front of the glacier doesn't appear to be moving at all,
AD: but certainly 10 times what you normally find.
JF: Oh yeah, minimal 10 times and we could see out across from our vantage point, where we were camped we could see out onto other parts of the Piedmont lobe, and recognize that there were there were deposits on the glacier that were moving down-glacier even faster than the ice was moving in the part that we were measuring. It could have been moving as much as 100 meters a day in some places.
AD: Different parts of the front of the glacier right?
JF: That’s right. Yeah. Well, by, according to the literature, there were only - that kind of movement, by the way, meant that the glacier was was technically referred to as surging. - Well, according to the literature there are only 207 glaciers in Alaska out of all of the 10,000 glaciers in Alaska that have ever surged, so we had not only an anomalous situation, but one that was unique in time. And you just don't walk away from a surging glacier, so that's when NSF recognized what we've been doing, and they funded a four season expedition for us to return there to document what was going on throughout the year during the surge. Well, the surge lasted for two years. The glacier, in the process of this surge, ran over our campsite where we initially camped and then where following couple of years, it ran over where we camped it again and it it was it, there was a there was a very emotional aspect to this too, where you could return to a place where you had camped the year before and it was now under the glacier and it made the whole idea that the Laurentide Ice Sheet advanced to places in North America and then retreated, and those places were once under the Laurentide Ice Sheet - it made all of it very, very real.
AD: In other words, the forward movement was sufficient, overcome whatever … and camping there would have been at the front of the glacier,
JF: Exactly yes but because this is a very unique situation, the question then is why do some glaciers surge and some don't? Well in this case, what happened was that all parts of the glacier melt the snow, melts the ice, melts the melt water. Perco, percolates down into the glacier, moves through the glacier. It's it's solid ice, but there are enough cavities and fractures and breaks and cracks through which the water can permeate and literally saturate the bottom part of the glacier. During surge conditions, that saturation not just keeps that base of the glacier wet, but there's enough pressure in the water to literally lift the glacier off its bed, and the glacier then slides forward on a lubricated surface and that constitutes the surge.
AD: How? How thick is the glacier at different points? In other words, if you drill down.
JF: The this particular glacier was something on the order of 2000 feet thick up where it was forming, up where it was forming, and filled valleys that were 2000 feet deep so that the glacier was that thick, but as it moved down-valley toward its terminus, it got thinner and thinner and thinner because it got into climate conditions that were warmer and warmer and warmer. So the glacier melted enough to get thinner and thinner. Where we were working on it, it was about 300 feet thick.
AD: Now if you were to go to Greenland, I think you'd find the uh depths there as one of the big ones in the world. Maybe the biggest. I don't know.
JF: Well, we were looking at an alpine glacier
AD: Right.
JF: Greenland is an an arc, an Arctic condition. It's an Arctic ice sheet. Antarctica is covered by Arctic ice sheets. The ice in Antarctica has about 3 miles thick. The ice in Greenland's about 2 miles thick and they know this from not only drilling, but also some seismic equipment like we used to use to find oil can be used to determine the depth, thickness of the ice. Yeah, the glaciers are large masses of ice and their masses, not just area, it's also thickness, as you pointed out.
AD: Well, as you segue just just just kind of a footnote here in terms of climate change, that is incredible amounts of water.
JF: It is, it is and the the water can only go one place, and that's in the ocean. So the amount of water added to the oceans from melting certainly contributes to the sea level rise. But also there's a sea level rise related to the warming of the ocean, and there was just a report released just recently that the oceans are warming a lot faster than the previously thought so, there's an expansion of the water when it warms, and all of that leads to sea level rise. But, there's no time in the geologic past when it can be documented that all of the ice everywhere, including the Arctic, um had totally melted. The climate conditions of our earth dictates that there will always be enough retention of snow and ice in the Arctic regions to have ice there. It's just that when the climate changes, the amount of ice there fluctuates from a lot to less to a lot to less and, this is what dictates glaciation versus non glaciation. The alpine region's glaciers grow, expand, retract, retreat. Melt and then regrow or re-expand in the next glaciation. So we've had multiple of glacial events, and those multiple events dictate the size and extent of the ice, and that's why at one point Oneonta and this part of the northeast was under the Laurentide Ice Sheet.
AD: Now your your research back to the Bering Glacier kind of was directed toward explaining why the surge at that time? Was it not?
JF: That that was part of it, yeah, to to gather, trying to gather enough information to to feed the discussion that was going on at the time in the glacial community about what causes glaciers to surge. Well, the thing that we documented that helped that discussion most, was after two years of surging in an event that lasted about 10 days. Most of the water that was trapped under the glacier that caused it to surge evacuated and a tunnel opened up in the region where we were doing our research on that, the segment of the glacier we are researching, a tunnel opened up. The size of any tunnel you've ever driven through, and out of that discharged water like a fire hydrant would discharge water and it carried blocks of ice the size of a barn hundreds of meters out, away from the front of the glacier. It caused lake levels that the water discharge into to rise 10 to 15 meters. The lakes themselves rose. It opened up new discharge areas for the meltwater to leave the lakes. New streams formed. It was, there was a, we were able to document the amount of discharge that was occurring in that part of the glacier that where it was leaking out on our part of the glacier and fortunately the documentation we made consistent with documentation on other parts of the glacier that was being monitored now by a couple of other organizations and research teams because once the glacier starts to surge, it draws a lot of attention. Just to regress for a moment, when we recognize the Bering glacier was in the process of surging the first summer that we saw this in 1993, we radioed the information to a colleague who then told faculty at the University of Alaska and Fairbanks, where there's a research institute for glacial research, the word spread very rapidly, and in a matter of 48 hours there were other small planes circling around landing, discharging three or four people in a camp 15 - 20 miles away where they were setting up to study that part of the glacier, and so on. And the US geologic survey got involved, the Bureau of Land Management got involved. They all set up research facilities, So what what part of what we accomplished was to let the world know this was happening, but then also to document from our own observations what was happening on our part of the glacier.
AD: Is there any way of, was there any way of measuring the pressure the water was under? You know the 300 feet of ice? Or is that?
JF: Wow. You could do this, because yeah, you you could from photographs make a pretty good estimate of the size of the tunnel. We made measurements of how fast the water was moving out of the tunnel, so, you can use those two to calculate how much water was coming out of there. Total amount of water coming out and as it turns out we were situated in one of the main discharge points, there were a couple of others. So yeah, you you could, you could do that calculation without actually, through indirect measurement.
AD: And then popular programs like Planet Earth and so forth, you will see the water disappearing into deep deep crevasses and that goes all the way down to the bottom I’d assume.
JF: Yeah, yeah
AD: Or close to it.
JF: In every temperate glacier and even some Arctic polar glaciers, the water at the surface that's produced by melting ice at the surface gathers in channels and then disappears, as you just pointed out into these cavities, and the water just plunges into into the glacier. These things are referred to as Moulin, which is a French term that makes reference to the churning effect at the base of these conduits, these vertical elevator-shaft-like conduits through which the water moves. But the water moves to a point where either to the base of the glacier and then flows away, or it moves to a part of the glacier where the bottom of the glacier, the lowest, a, couple 100 feet of the glacier would be totally saturated, and then the water leaks out of those saturated areas in in a less dramatic way than it does out of these places where the where the moulin feed tunnels that discharge the water out. But glaciers are are, most glaciers have a lot of melt water in them and it leaks out all every, throughout the year, even in the winter when the when the lakes out in front of the glacier are frozen, they're still melt water flowing out from under the glacier and you see this in leads in the ice, where the there's still water moving out into the into the frozen surface of the of the lakes. That tells you that the the the glacier is still generating melt water because it the ice melts under pressure. There's a lot of pressure. … The thickness of the ice, so it generates the water.
AD: You you began your research in 1990s - excuse me - before the time when there was more discussion about climate change. So then, in a way, your research was a telltale of what was to happen in a more intense way, years later.
JF: Yeah, there were clues that this is this was happening. And probably the most positive contributions our research made directly to the study of climate change and global warming was to provide rates at which changes are occurring, so that this can be compared to rates at other glaciers and other parts of the world, and add to the the growing number of glaciers that were being documented to be losing more mass than they were gaining by melting. So yeah, we what we did wasn't a direct, wasn't directly intended to measure climate change, but what we measured contributed to understanding the magnitude of climate change.
AD: Are there any glaciers that have maintained mostly in size or even increased?
JF: Oh, yeah, there are even in Alaska now 99% of the glaciers are all melting, there are a couple of glaciers that are in mountains that are high enough so that there's enough snow that falls there to make enough ice over a period of a few years to contribute to the ice of the glacier and that ice of the continues to flow down, down-valley, making and sustaining the size of the glacier. One of those, for years there was a glacier near Juneau, fed by the Juneau Icefield, the Taku Glacier, that was it was standing still in a stable position, not advancing, and not retreating, while all other glaciers fed by the Juneau Icefield were retreating and the reason for that, because you go to the headwaters of that glacier - the place where it originates - and those are the highest elevations of the icefield where the most snow fell so that snow gets converted to ice that maintains
AD: What would the elevations be at that point in time?
JF: In that latitude, only needs 5 to 6000 feet, but in other parts of the world where the mountains are a lot higher, similar things are happening, 99% of the glaciers in the Alaska range were retreating,
whereas 1 or 2% might be stable or actually advancing, so it's it's kind of a microclimate effect and not an indication of the total global climate to see that one glacier is advancing while others retreat.
AD: But the burden of the fact that most glaciers are retreating is a sign of, something
JF: Absolutely yeah. No doubt about that,
AD: Because the ones are not are anomalies at this point.
JF: That's true, they are anomalies, and even the - where you would expect glaciers to hold their own better, as in the Arctic, even those places are showing signs of loss of ice mass through through melting and retreat. And this this is going on in Antarctica as well. It was just just in the last week or so the American Geophysical Union newsletter included a short summary of a study that's going on in Antarctica, and if you look at a map of Antarctica there's a peninsula of land that sticks out in a narrow band out further than any other part of the coast. If you look at the opposite side of Antarctica, attempted to call it the southeast side, but I'm not convinced it's when you look at it where north and south are, it isn't SE. Nonetheless, there's a region where the ocean waters are causing calving of glaciers that coalesce from high from Alpine elevations on land. The glaciers coalesce, and then are are calving at their terminus and retreating back. One of those glaciers retreats back toward what is anticipated to be a basin in the bedrock under the ice so that if that glacier retreats to that point, then there'll be even greater amounts of calving and greater volumes of ice, leading to water leading to sea level rise in the
AD: Cause the basin is water underneath.
JF: That - right now there's ice under it.
AD: Okay
JF: If water gets under it, then it'll deglaciate fast, and and they're speculating that if that happens, it could lead to a sea level rise of as much as 20 feet, but that's all speculation. That's all something that may or may not happen in the future, but the potential for it is there.
AD: Well, It's informed speculation. I would assume
JF: It's informed speculation, but even probably the more thing that should get greater attention than that and is - and has for almost more than a decade now - there are many ice shelves that border Antarctica, which are shelves of ice hundreds of feet thick that extend out into the ocean off of the coast, and they're fed by glaciers on the land. It's been reported over the last several years that large chunks of these ice shelves have calved off, broken free and drifted. And and there's there's the forecast, it's less speculation now and more of a forecast, that if the ice shelves retreat back to the, or lose enough mass to retreat back to the coast, then the glaciers on land that feed those will also then be exposed to coastal conditions, which will lead to calving of them and once that happens they will flow faster. In other words, there'll be more water produced by ice melting and the ice will flow faster to generate even more and this is where the forecast of three feet of sea level rise comes.
AD: So what you're saying is these ice shelves are not if you drill down you wouldn't find land.
JF: Oh, no.
AD: You find you find ocean water, right?
JF: Right. They're out, they're out into the ocean.
AD: And how thick are these in some cases?
JF: Oh, these are hundreds of feet thick.
AD: Let let's talk about a couple ancillary subjects.
JF: Sure,
AD: You were very successful in getting grants to to to study what you were doing.
JF: Yes, that's not to suggest there isn't a lot of competition for those grants.
AD: Well, but you were successful in doing it.
JF: I was, yes, I was the the fact that the Bering glacier began to surge led to a grant from the NSF. NSF had money, perhaps it still does now, had money to support the unique and special activities that are going on in the world. Whether it's a volcanic eruption, or a places where plates are spreading and volcanic activity is occurring along the spreading plates,
AD: Even though it’s not in the territorial US.
JF: Right it could be
AD: For our National Science Foundation
JF: Could be anywhere in the world.
AD: Yeah,
JF: Well, once the Bering glacier started a surge, then an application to them tapped the funds that support the special events that take place. But so that was very gratifying that that, that helped a lot. I also received funding from National Geographic and National Geographic usually will, if they find value in a project that's being proposed to them, they'll fund it for a year and for a maximum dollar amount,
which is much less than you could get from, say, NSF, but: they they recognized what was happening at the Bering gla - National Geographic recognized what was happening at the Bering glacier and that we were the only team working there prior to the surge and were there at the beginning of the surge. So they funded me for three consecutive years, which I was very pleased with. That worked out very, very well because, as you might imagine, NSF gives the money to the institution and the institution then conveys the money to the researchers,
AD: After a few things are taken out
JF: Yeah, they take their percentage, they take their cut. National Geographic just writes you a check and it's just as simple as
AD: Now did any of your National Geographic work appear in the magazine? Their famous magazine.
JF: Came off very close Alan, very, very close. As a result of the surge and some of the photography that was done at the time, both from the air and on the ground I did have, you know I did have some pretty good photographs and if you give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters, they'll one of them is going to type King Lear.
AD: Or Macbeth.
JF: So I had thousands of photographs and I've picked what I thought were the best 30 or so and sent them to the magazine editor and I didn't hear anything, didn't hear anything, and of course this went along with a manuscript that described what these photographs illustrated and so on, didn't hear anything, didn't hear anything, and finally I decided to phone his office and ask what the progress was, if there was any, and his secretary pointed out that - your images at the time, they're 35 millimeter slides - your images have been on his light table longer than any other images I've seen him leave there, so you should be hearing something soon, but I'm not exactly sure what happened that sort of bumped me, kept - something else of greater global significance or something that involved special events that perhaps in other parts of the world or other project. I never made it to the magazine.
AD: Well, take heart, It’s now 2018 or 19 excuse me and they may do a retrospective.
JF: They might,
AD: Which would include photographs over historical periods of time.
JF: That's an excellent point. Now that there's greater emphasis on climate change, they may be interested in seeing just how how different the glaciers are now than they were then.
AD: Now you had a lot of folks up beginning with students.
JF: Oh, yeah.
AD: It was one of the real achievements that you did for this college.
JF: Well, I feel good about that, very good about that. I decided that well, the first time we went to the Bering I took one of graduate student, but from then on I decided that this was enough of a unique opportunity that I wanted to take uh two undergraduates each summer, and they had to be handpicked people. That, now we're going back to the we're going back to late late 80s, early 90s. Today you go to a geologic conference and you see almost half of the attendants are women, either undergraduate students or women scientists. At that time, it was a much, much smaller percentage. But it was growing, and I felt that I wanted to give students an opportunity to have this field experience, but I wanted the women in the department to have an opportunity too, so there were a couple of summers when I felt that the women majors in geology and water resources could handle that kind of an experience. The students didn't know that I was interviewing them for the for potentially being invited to go, when I just hold general conversations with them. But the general conversations included not only how dedicated they were to their studies, and I don't mean they had to be A students, it could have been a B student who was just as dedicated as an A student and hardworking, and diligent, and sincere, and gutsy, and - but it also had to be, an interview, that it told me that this student could handle a damp sleeping bag in a cold environment and not whine about it.
AD: For how long a period of time?
JF: Three weeks.
AD: Three weeks, OK,
JF: This student could eat food out of a can and not get tired of it, and whine about it, and complain, I didn't, I didn't want to put people in a position where they would be uncomfortable.
AD: Especially your culinary treats up there.
JF: Well, we were in bear country and therefore we wanted to produce the fewest food odors as possible, and so we we mostly ate out the can out of a can, but still you can't, you can't avoid some food odors anyway and when when we found bear tracks on our tracks coming back to camp at the end of the day, that's when one of my colleagues who was retired Army Colonel Palmer Bailey, who would bring weapons. He'd always bring 2 rifles and pistol and it wasn't so much for the safety issue as much, well, I guess it was the safety issue. He wanted to be sure that if we had to respond, we were, we could. And whenever we felt that there might actually be either a bear or even a mother moose who can be very, very dangerous, what we did, we had target practice. Like that day we got back to camp and found the prints on our prints, Palmer broke out the weapons and and after dinner that evening we set up some cans and we had target practice, and the students got a big kick out of doing this, but it was it was really intended to alert the neighborhood that we were there, and as soon as the animals heard these shots, we never saw many.
AD: How many student alumni, so to speak, of your research program up there? Do you have?
JF: I took 36
AD: 36 wow that’s excellent
JF: thirty six students over the years.
AD: Two at a time.
JF: Two at a time, there were four women. There probably should have been more, but as I said, I try to pick the people who are best suited for the physical environment, not just the academics. I feel really good about the progress of the four women that that did get involved, they all eventually went into careers that are professionally related, and one of the students not that turned out - not one of the women, but one of the students went for a job interview after he graduated with a environmental firm in the Albany area. They were doing studies of groundwater and quality environment and and he came back from his interview with him and said to me they didn't want to talk about my courses. They wanted to know what happened in Alaska. They wanted to hear about my experience in Alaska. So that, in that case it was obvious they were focused on it, but I'm sure that this kind of an experience then and even today, would tell a potential employee – employer - or grantor school that this student has qualifications.
AD: And your last time on the glacier was about about 10 years ago?
JF: Well, the last time at the Bering glacier,
AD: yes,
JF: Was ten years, it was ten years ago, 20-oh-9. I retired in 20-oh-7, which took me out of some funding loops. And the at the time I had connections with West Point, the faculty at West Point, and at the time the cadets had to satisfy summer internship programs - two summer internship programs between their junior and senior year - and it ended up that I took. 2, 2 cadets in 20-oh-8 and two cadets in 20-oh-9. Not just because the funding would help from West Point would help fund us, but because it would be a good experience for them as well, and West Point had some equipment that we didn't have that they would be willing to contribute. So yeah, that was that was 20-oh-9 and then I retired, and very much enjoying retirement when I got a phone call one January from a fellow who I had actually spent time with on the Juneau Icefield years before. And he said the director of the Juneau Icefield, the fellow who originated the program 89 years old and he and his wife ran the program from the, let's see, that would have been 50s, from the 50s on. His, his wife did all of the book work and did all, she actually wrote most of the grants, she's brilliant. And he did the science and did the field work, well between the two of them, they ran the Icefield program.
AD: Now this is a free-standing institute, so to speak.
JF: Yeah, yeah yeah. It is.
AD: OK, it is not at a university or maybe affiliate.
JF: Well, It has affiliation with universities only in the sense that the director of the program might be at a university and the current director’s at the University of Maine. But there are probably 8 or 10 scientists who visit the Icefield program through the summer, either for their own research or just to contribute to what
AD: This is on a continuing basis since you left?
JF: Uh, well, some of the faculty return on a continuing basis, yeah, but when when I was contacted this, I was told that the originator of the program, Mal Miller, 89 years old, and he had lost his wife. In 20-oh-6, and because she did so much of the organizational stuff for the program and, it was starting to come apart.And the fellow said to me, we'd like you to come out to Seattle, come to a board of directors meeting. We want to talk to you about possibly running the program for us and I said, but I'm retired. I I don't the dedication that's going to take to keep this program going really isn't for a retired individual, and they said, well, come on out, we'll talk about it anyway. I thought about it. Realize that in 19 – 60 - summer of 68 - was my first exposure on the Juneau Icefield, and it did so much for me. It it taught me so much, and as I said before, I wouldn't have been able to start the Bering glacier program had I not had the Icefield experience. I decided I got, there's got to be some payback here, I'll I'm going to go talk to them about it. Well, they wanted me to take the program and direct it, and I told them that I'd be willing to do it for two years, but not beyond that. It it requires somebody who has the potential for greater longevity for leadership. So I'll help you find my replacement, but I'll do it for two years. And I consider that that was a very important decision on my part, because it did dictate a lot of my time. But it was for a cause that I really believed in, and I felt that that the kind of energy I put into it, and because of my experience on the Icefield, not just in 68, but I went back and - multiple times after that - as volunteer faculty and helped in many ways, and I really knew what the program was all about, and how it ran, and it's philosophy, as well as it's it's calendar activity. And so, in the two years that I directed the program, with the help of others who were willing to contribute their time and energy and effort also, kind of kept the thing afloat, and actually got it started with some new momentum. We hired a new director and then I was able to back off.
AD: I imagine would have helped if you'd lived in Alaska too, I mean, or at least out on the West Coast.
JF: It would have been handier to do that. Yeah, it would have been. The Board of Directors consists of people who were mostly from the Pacific Northwest, it would have been handier and it would have been a little more, a little easier for access to Juneau for sure, no doubt about that, but even though I'm no longer the director of it and I'm glad for that, really. I enjoy retirement in other ways. I'm going to be going back this summer.
AD: Oh, good!
JF: I was invited to come back up for a couple of weeks, and I had to admit to the director who invited me to come back up that I can't quite carry the weight I used to carry, and I don't have the energy that was always there, and he's now now they don't - don't worry about that, we want you back up there so I'm going to be going up this summer and I look forward to it.
AD: Now this would be the Juneau Icefield or the Bering glacier?
JF: Juneau Icefield
AD: OK.
JF: Getting getting to the Juneau Icefield means I get myself to Juneau, and then I get in the helicopter and they fly me up to the Icefield. Going back to the Bering glacier would mean going to Cordova, first I’d need a budget. Because going to, got to go to Cordova,
AD: Getting there would be a
JF: Then you gotta charter an airplane and chartering an airplane now is $800 an hour, and putting a research team together and, and what kind of equipment am I gonna need when I get there, and am I gonna have access to that equipment? It just it, it's financially beyond my means,
AD: But it's a great way to close the circle in a way.
JF: It would. It would be good to go back, and I'm confident that if I contacted 4 gentlemen who worked with me at the Bering glacier for significant number of years- if I contacted them this afternoon and said, I'm thinking of putting a program beginning for next summer, would you be willing to be with us on the Bering glacier for two weeks in July? I would get an immediate response, positive response, no questions asked. They would just simply say count me in, and that's part of the gratifying part.
AD: Now as you prepare to go back to the Juneau Icefield are you, are you sleeping in a wet sleeping bag?
JF: (laughter)
AD: (laughter)
JF: The Juneau Icefield’s a whole different story.
AD: Is that so?
JF: The Juneau Icefield consists of a series of a half a dozen permanent camps
AD: Ah, okay
JF: Permanent camps that are located on bedrock adjacent to the glaciers, and these camps have a cook shack, and a dining area, and a lecture hall, and electric generators, and bunk houses, and electricity, and it's a fat city. It's a, it's a whole different thing than going to the Bering glacier, yeah.
AD: Well. It's been a great discussion and so, so many things you've accomplished it’s really wonderful
JF: Well, thank you. I appreciate an opportunity to share some of these experiences. It's been a great run.
AD: Thanks again.
JF: My pleasure.
Jay Fleisher interviews