• Question: What is the furthest you have travelled with your work?

    Asked by anon-257236 to Josh on 19 Jun 2020.
    • Photo: Josh Wolstenholme

      Josh Wolstenholme answered on 19 Jun 2020:

      Peru! My job was to install water level sensors to record how the water discharge coming off a glacier at 5000 m above sea level changes over time. Colleagues are working on using a numerical model called CAESAR-Lisflood to estimate how sediment builds up in the reservoir downstream, as 40% of Peru’s power comes from hydropower, it’s important to know how the storage capacity of these reservoirs will change in response to climate changes. Less ice = more melt now but in the future potentially very little therefore very little power.

      The sensors are still up there (since September 2019), the plan was to go and collect them this summer, but I’m not sure that’s going to happen! We’ve also got trail cameras installed so we can watch for geomorphological change over the past eight months (or however long the batteries lasted).

      You can find a summary of the project here with some pictures: https://seriousgeo.games/research/pegasus/

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