Glacier Island

The crew... Kalen (the geographer), me (the geologist), Mary (the biologist), and Rick (the pilot).



Pillow basalts on southern Glacier Island, once formed by lava flowing onto the seafloor (probably 20 million years ago).




Columbia Glacier... enormous and beautiful... retreating so rapidly that all the charts, digital shorelines, and Google Earth imagery are wrong! We had to fly an additional 100 km more uncharted shoreline than we estimated.




We also flew Port Valdez today, a different kind of environment, but incredible nonetheless. This is a spill response platform that gets mobilized during spills. It was ironically under repair during the Exxon Valdez spill. It is attached to a port that is built on an island that is half natural and half man-made, really interesting.