The microphone was on, but the presentation hadn’t started. Steven Squyres, NASA’s principal investigator for the Mars Exploration Rover mission, stood next to the stage as a few hundred audience members shuffled in to watch his presentation at the Geological Society of America annual meeting in 2011.

While Squyres fumbled with the transceiver, he saw a white-haired nonagenarian with a shirt pocket stuffed with pens scanning for an open seat in the front row.

“Dr. Miller!” Squyres shrieked over the PA system. “I haven’t seen you in thirty years! You’re the one who got me interested in geoscience. You’re the guy who started my whole career.”

The old scientist smiled; he posed for a photo. Then sat through most of the three-hour presentation by Squyres and the rest of the team working on the Spirit and Opportunity rovers on the possibility of liquid water on Mars, only occasionally grumbling that certain claims were “hogwash” or “geologically impossible.”

This scientist, Maynard Malcolm Miller (also known as M3), casts one of the longest shadows in climate research. In 1946, he created the Juneau Icefield Research Project (JIRP), which remains the longest continuous research program of any icefield system in the Western Hemisphere.

For 71 summers, young, wide-eyed participants like Squyres have embarked on an eight-week backcountry adventure from Juneau, Alaska, to Atlin, British Columbia, studying glacier health across the world’s largest non-polar mass of snow and ice. The program’s impact on an entire generation of climate scientists is immeasurable.

And for decades, Miller was the program's greatest defender—and at times, its greatest liability.

These Glaciers Tell a Story

Ryan Irvin

Although climate change feels like a 21st century problem, the signs began to appear decades ago. In 1949, a then 28-year-old Miller wrote in Science Illustrated that “tremendous recession of ice is going on; the Earth definitely seems to be warming up.”

Then decades later, Miller noted that the natural pulsations of the outlet glacier were no longer in synch with natural solar influence, and he suspected human-produced CO2 as the culprit. People at the time thought Miller was a quack to be talking about global, human-caused climate change. He insisted.

March 1949 issue of Science Illustrated. Science Illustrated

“These glaciers are telling a story,” he wrote in his 1949 study. “Only when we learn to read it can we know whether the Earth is warming up on a major scale.”

Miller served in the U.S. Navy during WWII and got involved in projects that studied how climate impacted military operations in the far north.

“Following World War II and into the Cold War, U.S. strategic interests included Arctic sea-ice research and measurements of ice thickness to assess effects on missile trajectories beneath the ice,” wrote Cathy Connor, a geology professor at the University of Alaska-Southeast, in a 2009 paper for the Geological Society of America.

But to understand the dynamics of massive glaciers like the Mendenhall and Taku and their subsequent waterways, researchers needed to study the source from which all of this ice and water originated: the Juneau Icefield, a 1,500-square-mile network of over forty large glaciers.

Long after the war, Miller continued to organize that research year after year, furthering our understanding of temperate coastal glacier changes. He would spend his entire life reading and teaching others to understand the story millions of years of glacial ice was trying to tell.

Breaking the Ice

Camp 18 at the Juneau Ice Field. Ben Huff Photography

Every June, when scientists-to-be descend upon Juneau, they have little more than a vague idea of what lies ahead. They may soon find themselves flailing around on skis for the first time, or scrubbing pots and pans while taking turns cooking meals for 30 people in a rickety shack with no running water.

Their summer journey will combine high-level scientific field work with backcountry ruggedness, as they measure factors such as glacial surface velocity while practicing basic mountaineering skills. With daily fieldwork and nightly lectures, participants bunk in ramshackle shelters and see as much bone-chilling wind and rain as skin-blistering sun reflected off endless mounds of snow.

High school, undergraduate, and graduate students learn alongside leading scientists, pursuing the project’s primary goal for the past seven decades—uncovering the chronology of climate events locked deep in these glacier systems.

"These glaciers are telling a story...only when we learn to read it can we know whether the Earth is warming up on a major scale."

The first week of the program involves intense mental and physical training. Students and faculty have to be able to ski across glaciers all day with heavy packs, dig snow pits to observe the density and stratigraphy at varying depths, and collect snowmelt on tarps for drinking water. After practicing self-arrest techniques with an ice axe on steep, icy slopes, they’re taught to use a three-to-one (or sometimes a five-to-one) pulley system for rescuing each other from any hidden crevasses along the way.

Participants must also sharpen their cold and wet weather survival skills as frequent storms smash into the Southeast Alaskan coast from the Aleutian Islands. As the designated blogger for one of the August legs of last year’s expedition, Ann Hill wrote “today’s infrastructure places distance between us and the technology behind our tap water, but here on the icefield, that distance disappears.”

“The dynamism, the movement and flow of the dramatic landscape was overwhelmingly beautiful...the power of the ice and rocks were humbling” wrote Susannah Cooley, a student at Davidson College. “It is an area devoid of apparent human influence, in which geologic forces served as a reminder of the comparable weakness of the human form.”

Generations of scientific leaders have seen this beauty and survived this gauntlet. On the rotting rafters of the rickety wooden shelter in Camp 10, you’ll find the signatures of hundreds of JIRPers who are now influential scientists.



Megan Ceronsky, JIRP ’95, served on the Obama administration drafting climate policy and passing climate regulations. Alison Criscitiello, JIRP ’03, is a Denali mountain guide with the first PhD in Glaciology ever conferred by MIT. While co-running the Canadian Ice Corps labs in Edmonton, Criscitiello has put up several first female mountaineering ascents in the Himalayas while adventuring with the likes of Kate Harris, a fellow JIRP alumni, author, and one of Canada’s top explorers.

Shad O’Neel, JIRP ’96, is also head of the glacier research program at the USGS Alaska Science Center, with more than 40 publications on the subject. World-famous aerial photographer Austin Post went up to map the ice field with JIRP in 1953, and Ed LaChapelle, snow science guru considered the grandfather of American avalanche research, was a JIRP field leader from 1954-1956.

But even this immense legacy in the scientific world wasn’t enough to guarantee its survival, and this decades-old ice survey would soon teeter on the edge of obsolescence.

Running Dry

Maps and notes belonging to Maynard Malcolm Miller. Ryan Irvin

Miller was his own force of nature, having acted as the chief scientist on the first American Everest expedition in 1963. A true pioneer, he once bamboozled a Rainier beer sponsorship of 200 cases shipped to the Himalayas for an expedition.

“Nature is screaming at you!” he would say. “She speaks softly with a lisp in a foreign language, but if you’re patient and listen closely, she will tell you great things.”

Alumni recall the time that Miller, well into his 80s, was walking around a glacier in old leather boots with his signature white cap and a long wooden ice axe. The staff watched him slip and fall and quickly slide upside down with his head barreling towards a rock. He pulled a textbook self-arrest better than any staff could have done, got up, and walked away smiling.

“Dr. Miller was always a bit larger than life,” recalls Erin Whitney, recipient of the NASA Alaska Space Grant Scholarship in 1996. “He could command enormous respect…Building all of the camps and establishing a traverse across an ice field in such inhospitable country is really quite an achievement. It takes a force of personality to make that happen.”

Guy Adema, Regional Science Coordinator for the National Park Service and JIRP ’94 alum, remembers if any item in camp wasn’t labeled, Miller would pick it up and write his own name on it. “He had a nefarious way of motivating and teaching and managing college students with a tremendous ability to educate and inspire.”

"Nature is screaming at you! She speaks softly with a lisp in a foreign language, but if you’re patient and listen closely, she will tell you great things."

But the same dictatorial force could also be harsh on the students and Matt Beedle, former JIRP Director of Academics and Research, will never forget being a 17-year-old high schooler assigned to radio duty in 1995. Beedle repeated his information very clearly, but Miller was hard of hearing from working around guns on WWII ships in the Pacific, and the task went undone.

“He totally reamed me out for it,” Beedle says. “I was in tears, utterly destroyed by this person I idolized and looked up to so much. Everyone has a story like that. He was very militant and could go over the edge at times.”

This conflict-prone strong-headedness burned bridges in the scientific community as Miller regarded even the most venerable scientists as students with much to learn. Faculty researchers didn’t want to be told what to do, so they vacated.

“M3 insisted on old-school surveying from the 40’s and 60’s, rather than modern weather-recording techniques with automated field collection,” says Guy Adema. “He held on too long and lost a lot of scientific credibility.”

Long Live JIRP

Ben Huff Photography

Climate change has only grown in our popular consciousness since the turn of the century, but when the world needed JIRP the most, the program was in noticeable decline.

As Miller aged and his health waned, it became clear that Miller, and his wife, Joan, who died in 2006, were nearly impossible to replace.

JIRP’s earliest grants came from the Office of Naval Research as they explored glaciers for potential use as military bases. Then, in the 1970s, the National Science Foundation awarded JIRP grants as they “tried to catch up with the Russians.” This lasted into the 90s, but the well eventually dried up as scientific research funding became more and more scarce.

The program began to draw faculty from an increasingly smaller pool of scientists and was no longer bringing in fresh scientific ideas or support. At rock bottom, student enrollment plunged to eight participants in 2008 and 2009 while maintenance of the shelters dilapidated to the point where it was unsafe for students to sleep inside, forcing them to tent nearby instead.

Steven Squyres, with Spirit mission manager Jennifer Trosper, after Spirit rover’s successful landing on January 3, 2004. Robyn Beck Getty Images

As the program struggled to fund basic facility upkeep and bring in visiting faculty, JIRP’s desperation struck a chord with its decorated alumni. In 2010, Steven Squyres wrote an endorsement for JIRP’s support to NASA’s Global Climate Change Education (GCCE) initiative, saying:

“It was my experience on JIRP that set me firmly on the path toward the Mars rover project. JIRP convinced me to become a geoscientist…I feel quite certain that the Mars rovers would not have happened had it not been for the JIRP’s efforts to involve students in a scientific research expedition.”

On top of alumni donations, former participants tried to jump in and run the program while keeping their own academic endeavors afloat, but the task overwhelmed even the most industrious volunteers.

Administrators were able to keep up the long-term glacier monitoring effort, but every year they’d look at the bottom line and wonder if they’d be able to scrap together a program for another season. Virtually everyone fighting to keep JIRP alive believed the program would soon collapse.

When Miller died in 2014, the Board of Directors scrambled to make changes. Instead of leaning on one leader to run the whole show, JIRP instituted a shared leadership structure with an Operations Manager to handle logistics and safety while the administrative duties were split among three main staffers: Erin Whitney stepped in as Executive Director in 2015, Beedle became Director of Academics and Research, and Mary Gianotti took on the role of Program Coordinator.

"I feel quite certain that the Mars rovers would not have happened had it not been for the JIRP’s efforts to involve students in a scientific research expedition."

The new coalition attracted more researchers to come and conduct their projects on the icefield along with some high school educational programs to collect usage fees and supplement students’ tuition.

Whereas the program used to be focused on the health of the Taku glacier, which is not indicative of the rest of the glaciers around the world, JIRP has come to rely on satellite imagery as a standard to get the big picture on what’s happening to glaciers worldwide now.

They’re also encouraging students to participate in group projects and submit abstracts to national science conferences like the Fall American Geophysical Union. This December, over half of this summer’s student participants will be there.

“The visibility is priceless,” says Dr. Whitney. “It creates quite a bit of publicity for us and highlights groundbreaking research being done up here.”

The program is now as robust as ever and scientists from all over the world are vying for an opportunity to join the students in conducting this significant climate research in a true expedition environment.

They’ve had to cap the cohort size at 32 students and eight staff members. Generous donations from loyal alumni are keeping the program afloat, which means they don’t have to rely on federal funding from a climate change-skeptic administration.

What started as one man's vision is now an institution dedicated to studying glacial health and climate change. Hopefully, JIRP will continue to nurture a new generation of scientists ready to tackle one of the hardest scientific and political challenges in human history.

2018 JIRP student participants will present their summer research findings at the AGU Fall Meeting, the largest earth and space science meeting in the world, in Washington, D.C., December 10-14.

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