Ken Mankoff has been traveling to both the Arctic and Antarctic as a research scientist since 2007 as part of NASA, the US National Science Foundation, National Geographic, and Danish government projects. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Cruz focused on Antarctic ice shelves and Arctic glacier hydrology. Prior to becoming a glaciologist he studied space weather (aurora borealis and australis!) and worked on several Mars robotic missions. He has been lucky enough to explore cold and icy environments from the South Pole to the top of Greenland and even inside glaciers in Svalbard. His research has taken him rappelling down crevasses and caving / crawling though unpleasantly small water-carved tunnels underneath glaciers to learn more about how surface melt influences glacier velocity. His favorite project was leading the field teams for a multi-year multi-national effort to find a missing A380 airplane engine buried in the Greenland ice sheet. His happy place is camping in Antarctica – which he prefers to Greenland only because for some reason he is less afraid of penguins than polar bears visiting his tent. When not guiding for Quark he works as a senior scientific programmer (mostly coding in Fortran) at NASA. In his spare time he tends to his house plants, reads, knits, and enjoys scuba diving.
About Us
My Expedition
