Harry Fielding Reid - Glaciology

Glaciology

While in Cleveland, Reid had begun to study glaciology. His interest in glaciers may have begun in childhood during trips to Switzerland, although the duration and character of such early travel is at present unknown. What is clear is that Reid eventually decided to undertake a serious study of the dynamics of glaciers, and in 1890 he organized a summertime trip to Glacier Bay in SE Alaska. He was accompanied by several young men from the Cleveland area, most of them students, one identified as H.P. Cushing. Cushing later had a long career as a geologist and was an elder brother of the celebrated neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing. Dr. Harvey Cushing would come to Baltimore in 1896 to train at the newly-founded Johns Hopkins Hospital before being chosen to head the surgery department at Brigham in Boston.

Reid’s trip to Alaska would result in his first professional publication, a long article in volume IV of the National Geographic Magazine, in those years still an academic journal. During 1892 he made a second expedition (like the first, evidently self-financed) with a small crew of hired men. Why any of the students and others from his first trip didn’t come a second time is unknown. Conditions in Alaska during that era could be at best called “pioneer,” and field scientists had no choice but to live in huts on the ice or else on camp on bare rock. The U.S. Navy sent a vessel past once each week during the warmer months, but the Glacier Bay region, like most of the territory of Alaska, was otherwise a wilderness that had only had the most cursory exploration done prior to 1890. Still, Reid took a set of measurements that showed how the glaciers were moving and changing, and he proposed a theory for how the front of a glacier maintained the shape that it did. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) would later name one of these glaciers for him.