Gregory Church

CR Cryospheric Sciences

The 2019 Outstanding Student Poster and PICO (OSPP) Award is awarded to Gregory Church for the poster/PICO entitled:

Detecting and characterising an englacial conduit network within a temperate Swiss glacier using active seismic and ground penetrating radar (Church, G.; Bauder, A.; Singh, S.; Rabenstein, L.; Maurer, H.)

Click here to download the poster/PICO file.

Gregory Church is a PhD student at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zürich), under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Hansruedi Maurer, Dr. Andreas Bauder and Dr. Melchior Grab. After spending several years employed in the hydrocarbon industry, he began a PhD project within the Institute of Geophysics and the Laboratory of Hydraulics, Hydrology and Glaciology (VAW) investigating englacial conduit networks and their evolution within temperate alpine glaciers using comprehensive geophysical analysis.
Gregory’s current research is focussed on detecting and characterising an englacial conduit system within the ablation area of Rhone glacier, Switzerland. Englacial conduits provide routing for surface water to the glacier’s bed which can facilitate basal sliding and thereby impact glacial sliding dynamics. The awarded PICO presentation highlights several years of field work and observations using ground penetrating radar, active seismic and borehole studies to detect, quantify and interpret these dynamical englacial water pathways.

Publication resulting from the award

Church, G., Grab, M., Schmelzbach, C., Bauder, A., and Maurer, H.: Monitoring the seasonal changes of an englacial conduit network using repeated ground-penetrating radar measurements, The Cryosphere, 14, 3269–3286, https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-14-3269-2020, 2020.