College of Liberal Arts & Sciences

College of Liberal Arts & Sciences

• Subglacial equipment

  Neal Iverson receives NSF funding to develop laboratory device to study subglacial processes.



• Three weeks out of a year, Neal Iverson spends his days (and nights) living beneath a glacier 700 feet thick. The temperature is a constant 35 degrees Fahrenheit. Not your ideal working conditions.
  
  The professor of geological and atmospheric sciences' research on glaciers has taken him all over the world, including Norway's Svartisen Glaciological Observatory, a tunnel cut underneath the Svartisen Ice Cap.
  
  There he conducts field experiments aimed at better understanding glacier flow, erosion and sedimentation.
  
  But now thanks to a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant Iverson will be able to conduct his research just down the hall from his Science I office.
  
  The NSF has awarded Iverson a $530,000 grant for the development of a laboratory "ring-shear" device for the study of subglacial processes. The device will be designed and built by Iverson and mechanical engineers in the Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory.
  
  Iverson said the one-of-a-kind device will allow conditions at the bottom of a glacier to be replicated and studied far better than in past experiments.
  
  "We hope to study processes that occur at glacier beds where the ice meets rock or sediment," he said. "These processes, like glacier sliding and deformation of basal sediments, help determine how fast glaciers move and how they've built the landscape, including those of Iowa."
  
  An international expert in glaciers, Iverson says this device will be the first of its kind in the world. While field research has provided vast information on glaciers, he says the new device can help answer questions about the speed of glacier sliding, mechanisms of glacial erosion and sedimentation, and the meaning of structures preserved in the geologic record of glaciation.
  
  "There is only so much you can learn looking at sediments in Iowa, inserting instruments into bore holes in glaciers or even doing the subglacial work we do in Norway," Iverson said. "Geologists have been doing laboratory flume experiments for about 100 years to study the flow and sediment dynamics of rivers. An analogous approach like this to the study of glaciers is long overdue."
  
  Features of the ring-shear device will include the use of a rock or sediment bed, unlimited sliding displacement, control of either stresses or sliding rates, control of basal water pressure, temperature control to 0.01 C, and continuous observation of sliding, sediment movement and flow separation between ice and the bed. The device will be housed and operated in an existing cold room in Science I.
  
  Iverson said attempting to simulate conditions will be difficult. One of the biggest challenges will be keeping a large volume of ice exactly at its melting temperature – true of ice at the bases of many of the world's glaciers – without melting the ice too fast.
  
  The NSF has funded Iverson and his team for three years. The initial timeline is to design and build the machine in the first two years and then begin tests in year three. Other glacier experts have already contacted Iverson about conducting experiments including researchers at ETH-Zurich, the University of Aberystwyth- Wales, the University of California-Berkeley and the University of California-Santa Cruz.
  
  Iverson says he expects to use the new device for the rest of his academic career.
  
  "We'll have a piece of equipment that can be used to study a broad range of processes that happen at the bottom of a glacier and that we've only been able to speculate on in the past," he said. "This will provide hypothesis-testing opportunities we've only dreamed about."

Neal Iverson

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August 21 to September 3, 2006

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