A Slow Break-Up

While much of the US East Coast and Midwest deal with fluctuating bouts of winter, a high pressure "bomb" over Alaska and the Arctic has kept temperatures unusually warm. Imagine a massive heat sink (the ocean) radiating heat outward (the sky), and it's not hard to see how such massive flows of arctic air are able to be pushed downward away from the Arctic.

Spring Break Up is when the layers of ice, sometimes 60+ feet thick along the rivers of the interior, begin to crack and fall apart, leading to flooding where the ice creates massive dams in some areas, and avalanches in the mountains. The snowpack this year hasn't been very stable with the mix of snow and rain. Here along the central coast, snow at sea level is only 30% of the 10 year average in spots, while the mountains further from the ocean's warmth have experienced a more normal winter season. Instead of snow, we've gotten rain, and lots of it.

The ice is breaking up quickly thanks to the weeks of sunny weather. You can really feel the heat of the sun, especially since we now only get about 4 hours of solid darkness.

As the snow melts, in combination with the intense winds we've been getting above the tree line, there are many interesting shapes carved into the snow. In the above picture, you can see the separate layers of snow that have merged together due to time and gravity. It is also a time where it is not uncommon to see animal tracks inverted across the landscape. As they walk, they compress the snow, and this compressed snow takes longer to melt, leaving behind the paw print of the animal, only in reverse. Below are some fox prints, for example:

These photos provide a glimpse of the kind of the micro-level details that are often impossible to see when looking at the vastness of the landscape. Unfortunately, DTube seems to be having an issue properly uploading videos. The system properly split the source video into smaller sub-streams but then all those options disappeared and I have been unable to get them back. So, for an overview of all drone flights today, you'll have to visit this link instead:

https://www.facebook.com/openearthproject/videos/416238168803094/