Matt Siegfried, a physical glaciologist and new assistant professor of geophysics at Colorado School of Mines, is currently in Antarctica contributing to the Subglacial Antarctic Lakes Scientific Access (SALSA) project, and his work, to service one of the continent's remote GPS stations, was featured by the Gizmodo news site Earther.
Funded by the National Science Foundation, SALSA aims to improve understanding of the interactions between the Antarctic ice sheet and the recently discovered rivers and lakes that exist beneath the ice. In December, a team of 50 scientists, support and technical staff established a remote field camp roughly 500 miles from the South Pole using specialized tractors, sleds and ski- equipped aircraft. There, they will undertake a large-scale expedition to explore Mercer Subglacial Lake, a lake twice the size of Manhattan that lies beneath West Antarctica's Whillans Ice Plain, a fast-moving stream of ice three-quarters of a mile thick. Hot water drilling through the ice will provide clean access to the lake, allowing the scientists to gather uncontaminated samples of lake water, basal ice and sediment, and be the first to film in an environment that has been isolated from the ocean and atmosphere for millennia.
Siegfried officially joined the Mines faculty on Jan. 1, 2019.