The 1995/96 data from this table was submitted to INSTAAR by Ray Kepner at the Desert Research Institute. It was included in several e-mail messages sent in August 1997. Denise Steigerwald, the data manager used the information in these messages to create a file called thckness.dat.
The 1996/97 and 1997/98 data was submitted to INSTAAR by John Priscu's team at Montana State University. The former is a Microsoft Excel version 6.0 file (icethk.xls), and the latter is an ascii text file.
Upon arrival at INSTAAR, the data manager fine-tuned the files to allow them to be merged for use on the MCM LTER web site. Adjustments included the following:
Lake Descriptions" file. added to the "Limno Holes, Dive Holes, Lake Level Measurement Locations" file.
The icethk.xls file did not contain variables for latitude and longitude, but records for each "location" represented in this dataset were added to the "Limno Holes, Dive Holes, Lake Level Measurement Locations" file (leaving the latitude and longitude fields blank). The links made possible by doing this will allow users to call up further information about a given lake (thru the link with the "McMurdo Dry Valley Lake Descriptions" file), and/or about a given sampling location on the lake (thru the link with the "Limno Holes, Dive Holes, Lake Level Measurement Locations" file).
icethk.xls file had variables for z-water, z-ice, and z-diff. After consulting with Craig Wolf (at Montana State University), the ice thickness variable was renamed to z-ice. project (S025) which is still taking place. John Priscu requested to have these records removed from the MCM LTER web site in an August, 1998 e-mail message. Any location codes containing a "C" followed by a number (eg. C01) were removed from this file.
Each of these adjustments allowed the all of the ice thickness measurements to be represented in one data file on the MCM LTER web site. The file was imported into Microsoft Access on INSTAAR's Unix system, and can currently be found there. The file was then exported in ascii, comma delimited text and MS-DOS text (table layout) to present on the MCM LTER web site. Both of these files are linked to this web page above.
Information for the metadata was obtained from the icethick.metadata.txt and Metaicethick9697.rtf files. The".rtf" file was called up using Microsoft Word version 6.0, and a simple text editor was used for the icethick.metadata.txt file. Text from these files was used to create this page in html format.
In 2006, Chris Gardner added Latitude and Longitude columns to the Ice Thickness table. He also deleted and reloaded seasons 2001-2002 through 2003-2004 as some errors were found. Lat/Longs were added to these dates as well. Metadata was also made conformant to the EML format, and served through the MCM webpages using an XSLT transformation.
In 2014, metadata was enhanced using the Drupal Ecological Information Management System (Inigo San Gil)
In 2016, enhancements to metadata and data updates were introduced using DEIMS (Inigo)