UNIS professor in geology, Doug Benn, did some squeezing into the ice while mapping the melt water tunnels of Hansbreen.

Text: Eva Therese Jenssen

Doug Benn, together with PhD student Jason Gulley from the University of Florida, and Polish student Artur Adamek recently spent 10 days exploring the melt water tunnels – or ice caves as they are commonly known, in Hansbreen, which flows into Hornsund, the southernmost sound on Spitsbergen.

Doug Benn at work in Hansbreen. (Photo: Jason Gulley).

The objective of the trip: to discover how ice caves form inside the glacier and to develop a new and improved theory on how glaciers move.

- The existing theory can’t predict how the water gets to the bed of the glacier, Benn says.

- What we are doing is important glaciologically, because the movement of glaciers is sensitive to the melt water that accumulates in the bed of the glacier.

The new theory that they are developing, is that drainage in glaciers is like drainage in moving limestone. The theory builds on the karst theory, but with important differences because glacier ice also melts and deforms.

The mapping in Hansbreen is funded by UNIS with logistical support from the Polish Polar Research Station at Hornsund. The research builds on many years of work by Polish researchers on the glacier.

This week Benn and Gulley will head for Nepal, where they will spend six weeks doing the same mapping of the ice caves in glaciers in the Himalayas. This mapping project is funded by the National Geographical Society in the U.S., which also funded a similar mapping expedition the two led last year.

- What we want is to understand is how all glaciers work, therefore we are mapping ice caves here on Svalbard, in the Himalayas and other regions as well, Benn says.

Benn made a preliminary presentation of the Hansbreen results for the Nordic branch of the International Glaciological Society in Tromsø last week.

Artur Adamek rapelling down the moulin
(Photo: Jason Gulley).