The Matanuska valley, northeast of Anchorage, Alaska
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Me and the Matunuska glacier.
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The obligatory kite. Unfortunately winds were too light to get
more than a few m up, so I didnt get any good pictures from it.
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Setting up the video projector. The projector, and a generator to run it, had to be packed in about a
half mile across the glacier
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Discussing pictures of Titan's lakes to camera. Note that Tom
with the sound gear and Haydn with camera are roped into a bolt
screwed into the ice, whereas I just have to be steady on my
crampons.
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First slide please - note the sun-cupped texture of the ice wall
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One of the cool things we did was launch chinese lanterns (little paper hot air balloons)
into the evening sky, while discussing to camera the escape of
planetary atmospheres.
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The BBC rescheduled the shoot due to weather, meaning I didnt get a helicopter ride, but I did get a
day off, so went hiking.
Despite being Alaska in October, scrambling up a 1000ft steep
sage-covered mountainside was hot work.
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Me and Prof. Brian Cox (a particle physicist, and a bit of a science celebrity in the UK, in the
9-seater Cessna chartered to take us to Cordova for the Lake Eyak shoot.
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From the charter flight, we had a good view of some of the glaciers on the Alaskan south coast
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Lake Eyak near Cordova has some methane bubbling up from its bed, which the crew shot. The bubbles were a lot
less interesting than the bald eagles around the lake. In 4 hours we unloaded the film gear from the Cessna,
drove out to Eyak, tooled around in a skiff catching methane bubbles, set fire to some, then put me back on the
scheduled flight back to Anchorage.
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