Professor Nick Holschuh, an assistant geology professor at Amherst College, explains his research and field work on glaciers in Antarctica, as well as his life under the harsh conditions there.
Faye: What exactly were you researching in Antarctica?
Holschuh: My research is really focused on how glaciers behave as physical systems. There are key processes that we don’t understand very well that have huge implications for projections of glaciers into the future. The two areas of research that have been my focus most recently have been the physics of glacier sliding, how ice interacts with the rock on which it sits, and also the physics of ice fracture, how ice breaks. I’ve pursued those two questions to try to improve projections of sea level rise for some of the most rapidly changing glaciers in Antarctica, to help understand the history of ice flow in Antarctica, and to find the Earth’s oldest ice.
Faye: When were you [in Antarctica] and for how long each time period? How many times have you been?
Holschuh: I’ve spent four Austral summers in Antarctica, and the typical field season has you leaving the United States in November or December and coming back in January or February. My first time was in the Austral summer of 2014-15, and then 2018-19, 2019-20, and 2023-24.
Faye: Are you planning to go back in the future?
Holschuh: If you’re an American doing field work in Antarctica, you have to be funded by the National Science Foundation. The funding timeline to propose a project, have it be selected, and then for [the NSF] to set up the logistics support is pretty long. We submitted a proposal to do work in Antarctica during my next sabbatical, which will be 2027-28, and that proposal is still in review.
Faye: What’s the most impactful thing you’ve found, if you can even put a finger on it?
Holschuh: I’ve spent the last ten years helping to develop a technology for improved imaging of the ice sheet substrate, what’s underneath [an ice sheet]. That new technology has changed what we can do when it comes to imaging the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheet. By better understanding the structure of the ice sheet, we can identify the processes that matter for producing the ice sheet we observe today.
I’m also part of this big project called the “Center for Oldest Ice Exploration”, which is trying to find a reservoir of old ice in Antarctica that spans a particular period in Earth history called the mid Pleistocene transition. Over the last million years, Earth has experienced 100,000 year-long ice ages. This means we experience an ice age, and then we come out of it into something called an interglacial and then back into an ice age. Somewhere between 800,000 years ago and 1.2 million years ago, that periodicity of the ice age has changed. Before that period, ice ages exhibited around 40,000 year-long cycles. We still have no idea why we have 100,000-year cycles today, and what drove the transition between those two periods. Ice cores give us our best record of past atmospheric chemistry, so there’s this really strong desire to find a continuous ice core that extends through this period, the mid Pleistocene transition. The project that I would go to the field for in 2027 is trying to find an ice core that spans that transition. That’s been a really cool focus of my research for the past four or five years.
Faye: What’s your day-to-day while in Antarctica?
Holschuh: When I first went as a young graduate student, I was just a brute force laborer. A lot of what you do in Antarctica is the operational work needed to survive, and so I spent a lot of time shoveling. In my first field season, it was a seismic and radar field season. We use radar systems and sound waves to look through the ice sheet into the subsurface. I’m a radioglaciologist, if I give you my most technical title, which means that I primarily study the ice sheets using radar. But, in that first field season, I was primarily supporting the seismic data collection, which was drilling holes and planting explosives so that you could detonate them. The sound waves would go through the ice sheet and come back to the surface. Now because I’ve been four times, and I’m a professor instead of a student, I occupy a slightly more senior role when I’m in the field. I help manage the logistics, plan the field season, and I coordinate with the contractor and the flight operations to make sure we’re getting to and from the places we need to go. This most recent field season, I was the scientist who was chiefly responsible for a particular radar system. Once we actually got to the glacier system, my day-to-day work was making sure the system was operating.
Faye: What are the conditions like while you’re there?
Holschuh: All of my research is what’s called “in the deep field”, which is far away from permanent stations. I’ve done two different types of field work. Some of it has been from a fixed camp where a plane will drop you and the rest of the team off, you set up a camp, and your little camp is totally self-sufficient until the plane comes to pick you up six weeks later. We’ll usually have one tent that has a propane heater in it, but otherwise all the tents are not heated, so it’s cold.
This most recent field season I did was from what’s called a traverse platform. There was a heavy machinery team with a giant tractor that dragged a train of sleds that could move from place to place so that we weren’t in a fixed camp location. Every day, the traverse would move. We’d go and collect data at a new location. We’d sleep in the tents that are set up on the back of the traverse, and then get up the next day, the traverse would move again, collect data. But again, it was a team. The traverse had two of us focused on radar, three scientists focused on seismic data collection, two field safety coordinators, and one heavy machinery operator.
Faye: Do you enjoy being there in those harsh conditions, especially when you’re moving around a lot like that?
Holschuh: I mean, Antarctica is beautiful, and some of the experiences are totally surreal. By the time we’re leaving, I’m always very happy to go. You’re pretty much working the entire time. You get up, you do the things you need to survive to go out into the field. One of the field safety coordinators and I would get on snowmobiles. We’d drive away from camp and collect data for 12 hours. Then you’d come back, you’d make dinner, you’d clean up, you’d refuel everything, and you’d go to bed. It’s a long working day. When the field season comes to an end and the plane is coming to extract you, you’re like, “Okay, I’m very excited for a bed and a shower and a fresh vegetable”.
Faye: I’ve heard you tell a story before about waking up completely drenched in sweat, only to go outside and freeze, would you mind retelling the story? It’s quite entertaining.
Holschuh: Yeah, so probably the worst night of my life. The first night after being dropped off at a place called Hercules dome, which is another prospective ice core site, it was really cold there, about -25℃, and we had been waiting to deploy. Finally, the plane said, “We can take you there”. The plane flew us to Hercules dome and dropped us off, where we had to rapidly set up camp. I’m emotionally and physically exhausted and I finally lay down to go to sleep in my tent in an extremely nice sleeping bag. It was very cold, so I had a hot water bottle filled with near boiling water to heat up the inside of my sleeping bag. I put it in the foot of my sleeping bag. It’s warm and cozy. I fall asleep. I wake up. It’s probably two or three o’clock in the morning, and I’m just drenched in sweat and deliriously tired. I’m like, “Oh crap”. I unzip my sleeping bag, which is full of my sweat, and all of a sudden, the sweat on my skin and the sweat in the bag is starting to freeze because my tent is -20℃. Not only am I deliriously tired, but now I’m starting to freeze. At that moment, I was panicking and thinking, “Oh my god, I’m gonna die”. I got out of my sleeping bag, used some of my socks to dry off, and then put on all my cold weather clothes, left my tent, and laid out in the snow. It’s 24 hour sunlight, so it’s bright outside, and I’m laying out there staring up at the nice blue and white sky at two or three in the morning. I probably lay there for an hour, then go back into my tent, and all the sweat that was in my sleeping bag had now frozen. I could basically shake it out of my sleeping bag and get back in, so I went back to sleep.
I just remember thinking, this is the first night of five weeks. This is going to be rough. Every single night that I’ve had in Antarctica since then has been better. I remind myself now, the first time I make it to a field camp, I am fully aware that the night’s gonna be bad, but then you get into the swing of working so hard and sleep is easy. You figure out what’s comfortable and works for you, and then it’s just like normal life. I think that’s one of the things that’s most shocking about spending extended periods of time in Antarctica—it proves to you how anything can be made to feel normal.
Faye: When you were in Antarctica, what were some of the small things that made your experience more bearable and enjoyable in the moment?
Holschuh: Every year, I’ve brought letters from friends and family that I’d open on Christmas. My nephew sent me a Pokemon card to help me when I was in the field. We actually make really good food on the holidays. The first time I ever had duck was when I was in Antarctica.
Faye: Interesting.
Holschuh: Assuming that you’re with a team of people who know how to operate in those conditions, you get a lot of support from the people around you. When it’s hard, everyone is going through the difficulty together, and more often than not, that leads to a nice, collaborative environment. In all my field seasons, the people around me have really been a major source of support by the end.
Faye: How has going to Antarctica made your research more meaningful to you?
Holschuh: One of the things that’s amazing about being able to do field work is that you get to construct the experiment. I also do research that uses publicly available data and remote sensing data. Those data can tell really powerful stories about the operation of glaciers, but it’s rare for the data to take the exact form you need. When you’re in the field, you get to collect the data just as you want it. Not very many people have had the opportunity to do that, to study these extremely remote places with a design that they create. That’s an amazing aspect of being able to do field work in Antarctica.
The other side of things is that being in the field, even though Antarctica is almost featureless in the places where I’ve been, has actually changed my perspective on the scale and operation of the Antarctic ice sheet. I was just on Thwaites Glacier in the 2023-24 field season. Thwaites is the subject of huge scrutiny. When you read articles in the New York Times about glaciers in Antarctica, nine times out of ten it’s about Thwaites Glacier. I had been studying it for probably six or seven years just from data that other folks have collected. I finally got to go there, and in going there and driving around the surface, having been to other glaciers in Antarctica, you could actually see in this almost featureless landscape what makes Thwaites Glacier unique. It flows over very rugged topography, and that expresses itself in the surface in these very gradual hills and bowls that I’ve never experienced anywhere else. Most often when you’re on a glacier in Antarctica, it’s essentially perfectly flat. Very, very, very few glaciers have any surface topography at the scale that Thwaites has. I get this very novel, interesting perspective from being there that helps me understand how truly different this system is from others where I’ve been.
Faye: If I understand it correctly, you’re bringing your research back to your students. Do you mind describing what you do with your students in the research?
Holschuh: Geophysics attracted me as a field because it was a field where you could go collect the data and do the analysis later. I had been in other geology classes where you really had to draw conclusions when you were in the field. That always stressed me out to be under the time pressure and needing to do everything right in the moment. That’s still partially true, you need to collect data thoughtfully as a geophysicist, but once the data have been collected, you bring it home, and that’s when the actual science starts. Most of what I do with my students is work with data I’ve collected in the field or that my partners have collected to better understand either the structure of the ice sheet, the makeup or geometry of the substrate, the interface between ice and rock, the mechanics of sliding, or the mechanics of fracture. I have a regular crew of students who come do geophysical data analysis with me. I have a nice little computer lab right next door where students can sit and write Python code to analyze geophysical data.
Faye: Have you found that by working with these students, they’ve shown interest in going out to do their own fieldwork?
Holschuh: I’ve had a slew of thesis students since I’ve been at Amherst.Of those thesis students, four have gone on to PhDs in glaciology. Two will have done Antarctic field work by the end of this year, one has done work in Greenland, and the fourth, I think, wants to do field work. He worked for the Alaska seismic network for a year between Amherst and grad school. He’s just starting his PhD now, and is probably on a trajectory to do some kind of field work in the future. I don’t know if any of the students that went on to do PhDs in glaciology did it because they wanted to do fieldwork, but my training sets them up best to think like a field scientist. In some ways, I primed them for this kind of thing.
Faye: You’re making me want to do work in the field, haha.
Holschuh: It’s a crazy experience.
Faye: Is there anything else you would like to mention?
Holschuh: I think something that’s really important is that studying the Earth is a very interdisciplinary pursuit. In order to understand the operation of the climate, we build knowledge from first principles physics, first principles chemistry, concepts in math, concepts in computer science. I think it’s important to reinforce the understanding that this type of work requires all sorts of subjects. Field work, for some, is a draw into the discipline, but it’s not a requirement, and the field would be really disadvantaged if everyone only did field data analysis. We need people who like working in the chemistry lab. We need people who like working at the computer. If you never want to step foot outside your entire life, there is a lot of work to be done in the earth sciences that could really benefit from a diverse range of skills. I do feel very fortunate that I get to go to the field to collect data, but I also feel very fortunate that there are folks working tirelessly, not in the field, to advance our understanding because both of those things are really required.
Faye: Very wise last thoughts. Thank you so much for taking the time to answer my questions and teach me more about your field work in Antarctica.
Interview edited for concision and clarity by Faye Riebe.
You must be logged in to post a comment.