Iowa State University Alumni Association| online edition | spring 2006
Frozen assets: Jim Colbert and Neal Iverson pursue interests that take them to Arctic environments, not unlike this walk-in freezer in Friley Hall.

 


SPRING 2006
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(N)ice guys

Working 18-hour days in freezing temperatures. Eating pickled fish every day. Staying in cramped barracks with no privacy.

Not great working conditions for any job.

For Neal Iverson, professor of geological and atmospheric sciences, it gets worse.

He does all this in a tunnel beneath an icepack 700 feet deep for up to three weeks at a time.

“It’s not a pleasant place to stay,” Iverson admits.

Jim Colbert thinks Iverson is nuts.

“I would like to visit his glacier, but I don’t think I would want to spend three weeks under it,” says the associate professor of ecology, evolution and organismal biology.

The only time Colbert is under the ice is when he breaks through a frozen lake in northern Minnesota on one of his annual winter camping treks to the Boundary Waters.

It’s a “hobby” Colbert has pursued since he was a high school student in eastern Iowa. As a biologist, he has continued to explore Iowa and Minnesota during the winter.

“There is a lot going in the winter, and it’s much easier to see,” he says. “The wilder-ness ‘expands’ in the cold.

“It’s much more peaceful, although it can be a little frightening. But it’s a real uplifting feeling that you have the knowledge and skills to take care of yourself.”

Only in the winter, Colbert says, could you stand in the middle of a snowstorm and hear a pack of wolves or come across so many animal tracks.

Colbert has passed along his love of winter camping to his Iowa State students, leading multi-day academic excursions to the Boundary Waters.

There is one drawback to spending up to a week in temperatures that can dip as low as 40 below zero at night.

“A hot shower,” Colbert says. “If there were hot showers out there I’m not sure I would ever leave.”

Iverson is passionate about his glacier research, but he doesn’t share Colbert’s love of icy environments. His National Science Foundation-sponsored field research is aimed at better understanding how glaciers move across rock and sediment and how they shape the landscape.

The best place to conduct that research is on site. And the only place to study the bottom of a glacier directly is Norway’s Svartisen Glaciological Observatory, located in a tunnel cut underneath the Svartisen Ice Cap by a power company to generate water for hydropower.

It’s in this cold, damp place where Iverson has lived for three weeks at a time during most of the past 10 years.

“It may not be a pleasant work environment, but it’s a great natural lab to study glaciers and glacier motion,” Iverson says. “It’s an exciting place to work to be able to see what’s going on beneath a glacier first hand.”

-- D. Gieseke

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