MTU Scientist Explores Glacial Caves

Soft spoken and with the wiry frame of an avid outdoorsman, Jason Gulley’s eyes light up when asked about caves.  “They have a mystery around them,” he says.  “Even with the oceans we know where the deepest parts are, but with caves, you never know how long or how hard it’s going to be to get where you’re going.”

Scientists have not figured out how caves interact with the landscape, creating changes in hydrological and geochemical processes that can cascade throughout an entire ecosystem, sometimes to profound effect.  And it is those profound effects Gulley, an assistant professor of geological and mining engineering and sciences, wants to understand better—not just through mathematical models or theoretical predictions, but with hard evidence collected in some of the world’s most challenging natural environments—artic glaciers and coastal caves.

His fascination with caves started as a child, first from books, then from Wild Cave Tours when he donned a hard hat and “crawled along with park rangers,” a pastime he found “totally fascinating.”  In college he expanded from amateur spelunking to cave diving, which spurred curiosity about the caves themselves. He wanted to know how limestone caves in Florida were formed, how water wended its way from surface to underground and out again. A chance encounter with a glaciologist while he was rock climbing got Gulley thinking about similarities between these two seemingly opposite environments:  karst aquifers (limestone caves) in semi-tropical and tropical climes and glaciers found in cold, mountainous regions.  Both are self-organizing systems; both have fissures at the surface that efficiently carry water; and both, he reasoned, could be analyzed by similar scientific methods.

Until Gulley and his team, no one was doing scientific research inside glaciers. Most hydrological research had been done via numerical models and proxy techniques like ground-penetrating radar or dye tracing. But in Alaska, and later Svalbard and Greenland, Gulley changed all that—rappelling into crevasses and setting up instruments to monitor melt water and to map glacier caves and flow paths. Traditional theory predicted that differences in ice thickness and slope primarily governed how much water pressure would occur at the base of glaciers, and thus be the key factors in determining glacier sliding speed.  Gulley’s direct observations, however, showed that the presence of moulins (naturally- occurring tunnels that bring melt water from the surface to the base) play a more important role than ice thickness and slope in subglacial recharge.

For the full story, see http://www.mtu.edu/news/stories/2015/february/jason-gulley-temperate-man-extreme-climes.html.