RADFORD -- Radford University physics professor Rhett Herman and a group of students traveled to the northwest tip of North America in March to continue research and surveys of sea ice near the small, cold town of Barrow, Alaska.

Next week, Herman and three of those students, Trevor Twyford, Laura Sweat and Jeremy McLaughlin, will again traverse the continent, this time to present their findings in San Francisco at the December meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

“This meeting is attended by about 16,000 scientists from around the world -- it’s the world’s largest scientific meeting -- so it should be an amazing experience for our students,” Herman said.

The poster presentation prepared by the professor and his students details data from three-month-old ice that was collected on the Chukchi Sea. The group is comparing the data against two-month-old sea ice from the same area that was surveyed by Herman and another group of RU students two years earlier. The researchers also used the data to produce two and three-dimensional images of the ice.

Also at the conference, Herman will present findings from a study conducted during a July journey to the Solomon Islands, where he and RU professors Donna and Cliff Boyd searched for the remains of the missing U.S. Marines in the Goettge Patrol that who were lost during the 1942 Guadalcanal invasion.