Scientist to recount adventurous climb in Appalachian State appearance

Appalachian State University is hosting an appearance Friday by Alison Criscitiello, a National Geographic explorer who is a trained mountaineer and a glacier scientist. Her work includes climbing Mount Logan, the highest peak in Canada, to retrieve samples of ice that are thousands of years old. 

At times the temperature on the mountain reached minus 40 degrees and half her team had to be evacuated due to the high-altitude conditions. Wake Forest University student Aria Heyneman is working in partnership with WFDD and spoke with Criscitiello. The conversation begins with explaining how her training as a mountain climber prepared her for the expedition.

"Logan is a pretty serious mountain," she says. "I had climbed it to ski it before, you know for, 'fun.' It's pretty inhospitable. And the small team that I took with me both years, the 2021 and 2022 teams, all had very significant high altitude mountaineering backgrounds, in addition to having the right science background kind of like me, so it was completely critical. And it also was the very first time that these two seemingly disparate skill sets of mine and really important parts of my background came together."

Interview highlights

On the mental and physical perseverance it takes for the mission:

"It is actually what I had planned for ...  I had six people with me and three of them were spectacularly medivacked, all due to life-threatening altitude issues. Again, that sounds dramatic, but that was what I anticipated. Logan is both high and you feel the altitude more than you would at that at those elevations on other peaks because of the latitude. In other words, there's less oxygen then there can be higher up at a lower latitude. One of the three was quite dramatic, with HAPE - high altitude pulmonary edema. It's a very serious life-threatening altitude illness. So on the way up, we hadn't even gotten to the drilling site yet, and there was already quite a bit to work through. But these really are the kinds of things with a lot of experience that might happen, and you know what you're going to do. So I was able to deal with them all and carry on with the rest of the team each time.

And then in terms of the drilling, you know, everyone is critical in their own way. But I would say, you know, one of the most critical people was the drill engineer, my friend Etienne, who is, in fact, the person who built the drill that we used. He can fix things I can't. And he did have some very serious altitude issues on the way up ... But he ended up making it and it was a good thing. The drill had one what-could-have-been catastrophic breakdown that shut the drill operation down for eight hours that day ... So there are so many things that can break, especially when you add altitude to it, just like our bodies. But yeah, kind of like dealing with the more human issues that came up, we are able to kind of triage and carry on."

On what she hopes can be learned from the research:

"We have very few paleoclimate records from the North Pacific. We have many wonderful records from the polar regions because ice is preserved in polar regions easily. But outside of the polar regions, ice is  — over tens of thousands of years  — not generally well preserved, because these places outside the poles, even on a lot of high peaks, melt in summer. But Logan is an exception, it has remained ice-covered even through the height of summers for tens of thousands of years. So that means there's the potential for all sorts of climate reconstructions from this record. A new wildfire history will come out of this. So looking not just at changes in wildfire frequency over time in the North Pacific, but also looking at changes in the vegetation that was burning. And then another thing that's sort of my area of expertise, is looking at changes in the local ocean over time."

On the future of glaciology:

"I can say I've seen an enormous amount of change, both in across kind of public awareness but also in younger generations' commitment to changing the trajectory we're on, which just gives me an enormous amount of hope."