Saturday 24 May 2014

Good News Everyone






Good news indeed... albeit a little delayed from the actual announcement... but this summer will be an awesome adventure of the Grand Alpine Tour, a research project and the recipient of this year's RGS (Royal Geographical Society) Land Rover grant.

 Principally organised by, and awarded to my PhD co-worker Mark Allan, the grant provides a team of people, including myself, the ability to conduct a significant fieldwork component of Mark's research project which is concerned with the frequency and magnitude of landslides which occur above melting/retreating glaciers in the European Alps.  The great interest in this project for me especially is the way in which the occurrence of these landslides impact the interaction of glaciers with the overlying atmosphere.  Because debris cover on glaciers acts to alter the response to climate, and much of the debris is often sourced from these landslide events, there is great importance attached to our need understand them.  Among several others, there will be some nice visits to the Rhonegletscher, Mer de Glace and my study glacier, the Miage.

Among other possible techniques, the main method for capturing this change is using the increasingly popular choice of a UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) or hexacopter if you will.  Constructing 3D models from mass amounts of images using structure from motion (SfM) imagery then allows this change to be realised.


  In addition to some generous funding, the grant provides the Grand Alpine Tour team with a shiny new kitted out Land Rover Defender to carry all the equipment and help us over the harder routes through the Alps.

The land rover.. looking pretty good in the pic below will be invaluable then to this project, which is represented in more detail on the webpage http://grandalpinetour.com/ ......and the Land Rover press release can be seen here



Throughout the duration of the trip, updates will be made to both twitter and facebook pages.   Give them a like/follow... interesting things to come! :)

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