Career Trajectory

Career Trajectory (how did I end up here)

I am interested in understanding the basic physical laws that control processes on the Earth’s surface. Although a wide variety of topics interest me, my focus is on ice, particularly glacier ice. My background in the subject started with ice crystals in the atmosphere, became grounded in lake ice, switched to sea ice, and then I found a job….in glaciers. I’ve remained there ever since. My research is devoted to the problem of water and glaciers, and the variation of glaciers with climate. I am glad to have found this niche because it affords me the pleasure of collaborating with some great people in a close community of scientists. In many ways the culture of glaciology is unique among the sciences and I feel very lucky to be in this field.

I was a regular kid who had an interest in science, mostly rocks, weather, exploring streams, growing vegetables in my bedroom (I grew corn). I had a rock collection from biking around the neighborhood, collected on family vacations, or what friends and relatives gave me. That all changed in junior high school when we had a general assembly for all the students.

The speaker was Al Hulstrunk from the Atmospheric Sciences Research Center (SUNY-Albany), Schenectady Airport laboratory. He narrated a his documentary movie on snowflakes and experiments he and the Center were conducting at Yellowstone National Park. In winter, the steam from the hot springs supersaturated the air with water vapor (humidity 101%) creating conditions similar to the atmosphere at high-altitudes, perfect for triggering ice crystal formation.

He also showed how to 'preserve' snowflakes, which really was a method to create casts of snowflakes. I was fascinated and wrote to the laboratory for a copy of the directions. From then on it was pretty much snowflakes and weather. I got rid of all the rocks except for a couple of the best ones. As a junior high school student, I was outside in the winter collecting and preserving snowflakes. In high school, I worked summers at the airport laboratory doing whatever was needed, mostly cleaning or organizing stuff. Sometimes (not often) I got to help out with an experiment. Once, I helped build a giant fog chamber (I hammered lots of nails).

Vince Schaefer 1989

The director of the lab was Vincent Schaefer, who (with Irving Langmuir) was the first to seed a cloud and create snow. Although I never worked with him I gather he was keeping an eye on me from a distance. During my senior year, he invited me to join the annual January Yellowstone expedition. This is the same expedition that I saw in Al Hulstrunk's documentary. It was very exciting, got out of school, my first trip in an airplane, and helped to conduct ice crystal experiments.

I decided then I wanted to study weather. I was thinking of going to college for meteorology. Asking Dr. Volker Mohnen at the lab about it and he told me the foundation in atmospheric sciences was physics and/or chemistry. In graduate school they can teach the weather but not the physics or chemistry. So I went to St. Lawrence University and studied physics. It was a tough major and often seemed irrelevant to my interests, but it one of the best things I ever did. It opened many doors in science.

Volker Mohnen

While home on Christmas vacation from college I went ice skating on Lake George with Peter White and his father Bill White. While skating around Bill pointed out lots of interesting features in the ice, bubble patterns, cracks, and pressure ridges. The following year, during our January interterm, me and my friends devised a research project on lake ice at Lake George. While doing the research paper I discovered the world of ice - lake ice, sea ice, snow, glaciers. People were researching all forms of ice. I was hooked. The semi permanent nature of ice on the Earth's surface was bigger and less ephemeral than ice in the atmosphere. And it was easier to study.

Bill White crossing a pressure ridge on Lake George ~January 1970

I went to graduate school in geology at Dartmouth College to study sea ice with Willy Weeks at the US Army research center down the road. I had the fortunate experience of working on the North Slope of Alaska and in the laboratory. It was great. However, I wasn't getting along with Dartmouth Geology. They were a hard rock group with little interest in ice and I was very interested in ice and little interest in rocks. I was asked to leave having pretty much quit on my classes.

A year off at home, substitute teaching, volunteering at a local public access TV station, and doing science experiments on lake ice at home. Finally, I came to realize that if I am interested enough in science to do it as a hobby, I should make it a career.

Kumiko and Taku Ohtake

So I applied for a MS program at the University of Alaska in atmospheric sciences. I figured it was about as good as being overseas on a foreign adventure (it was). My advisor was Taku Ohtake, an expert on atmospheric ice crystals and I greatly enjoyed my time with him and my first exposure to Japanese culture, something in which I had a vague interest. I also took a class in glacier studies taught by Carl Benson. It was interesting but as a career, not that interesting.

After graduation I was looking for a job in science and a friend suggested the US Geological Survey office in Tacoma, WA. It was a glacier research office led by Mark Meier. They were interested in someone to process the weather records on the glacier and I was hired on a temporary work assignment. From the exposure of the folks in the office on various research aspects on glaciers, I became interested, eventually focusing on how water moves through a glacier, how glacier runoff affects stream flow, and how glacier change is related to climate change. From then on, I stayed with glaciers. And I was working for Mark Meier, who I later realized was one of the early glaciologists in the US to provide a the geophysical approach to glacier studies. As a widely recognized expert the research group was visited by an international array of scientists.

From the exposure of the folks in the office on various research aspects on glaciers, I became interested, eventually focusing on how water moves through a glacier, how glacier runoff affects stream flow, and how glacier change is related to climate change. From then on, I stayed with glaciers. And I was working for Mark Meier, who I later realized was one of the early glaciologists in the US to provide a the geophysical approach to glacier studies. As a widely recognized expert the research group was visited by an international array of scientists.

As I gained further understanding and insight into glaciers, I realized there were a number of problems I was interested in but didn't have the scientific tools to solve so I decided to go back to graduate school to study for a PhD. Fortunately, the University of Washington in Seattle was/is a top school in ice studies and I enrolled there. I first approached the Geophysics Department, the home of glaciology at that university. But the department chair told me that they were not interested in a working student. I had a good job with the USGS and I did not want to give that up for an uncertain research future.

Wendell Tangborn on South Cascade Glacier ~1960?

Wendell Tangborn, formerly with the USGS office, suggested I contact the civil engineering department. That seemed like a good idea considering I wanted to study how water moves through a glacier and civil engineering had a strong hydrology & hydraulic faculty. The department saw no issue with a working student and welcomed me into the program. And because by undergraduate degree was in physics, taking undergraduate classes in engineering was unnecessary (and I wasn't interested in building roads or bridges).

W. Tangborn 2010

As it turned out, as I got further into my dissertation work, my graduate committee asked Charlie Raymond of the geophysics department, who was on my committee, to chair my committee and advise my thesis. I was very lucky that he agreed. He was widely recognized for his seminal work on glaciers including glacier hydrology.

Charlie Raymond

The office in Tacoma was eventually disbanded when Mark left the USGS and I was transfered to the USGS in Denver, CO to work with Geoge Leavesley. George was a snow hydrologist but he allowed me to keep my activities in glaciers. The hydrology group was relatively small and I was surrounded by sediment transport research scientists. My wife, Virginia, an archeologist has also finished her PhD and was looking for work. Portland State University hired her in the anthropology department and I left the USGS for an uncertain future in Portland. After a year or so, I asked if I could get an office and teach in the department as an adjunct. The chair at the time said, that because of my physics background and hydrology courses at UW, I could teach groundwater. And with that, I was on the faculty, eventually being offered a tenured appointment.