Ben Pelto, Kindy Gosal, Alexandre Bevington and Jesse Milner take radar measurements while towing the radar high on the Nordic Glacier in the southern B.C. Interior.
Lead author Ben Pelto and his colleagues skied cross country on the glaciers over 182 kilometres, pulling a sled-mounted ice-penetrating radar system to collect thousands of measurements.
They found the total volume of ice in the basin is roughly 122 cubic kilometres, or about 23 per cent more than computer modelling had estimated.
"I was surprised that the models were off by that much," said Pelto, who completed the work with support from the University of Victoria's Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions and from B.C. Hydro. "There are about 17,000 glaciers in B.C. and until now we only had ice measurements from a handful of them."
Comment: A 6.1 magnitude earthquake also hit the Balleny Islands region last week on Nov. 25, 2020.