University of Maine educator dove into a 100-foot precipice in Antarctica !

ORONO, A University of Maine educator who dove into a 100-foot precipice in Antarctica while leading examination was recollected Monday as a gregarious atmosphere researcher who helped the mind-set of everyone around him.

"You realized that if Gordon came into the tent, that things would have been fun and lovely," said Paul Mayewski chief of the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine.

Hamilton, 50, was riding a snowmobile in a deceptive segment of ice while distinguishing hazardous chasms when one of them gulped his snowmobile Saturday, killing him.

The zone where Hamilton's group stayed outdoors was known as the Shear Zone where a moving ice rack comes into contact with ice ashore, making profound chasms, or crevices. A portion of the precipices were being loaded with snow to guarantee supplies could be transported 25 miles to McMurdo Station, the biggest of the three U.S. explore stations in Antarctica.

"They were rehashing a movement that they'd done ordinarily some time recently, however it's a hazardous region and mishaps happen. That is precisely what this was," Mayewski said.

Hamilton appreciated a decent joke, however was not kidding about his examination.

He invested a lot of his energy in Greenland and Antarctica considering the development and softening of icy masses and how that adds to rising ocean levels.

"Ice sheets are the greatest potential giver to fast ocean level ascent," Hamilton said in a video made by the University of Maine. "On the off chance that we need to know how much ocean level is going to ascend in the coming century, we have to see how ice sheets act."

His misfortune disheartened numerous in the little universe of environmental change researchers.

Waleed Abdalati, executive of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado in Boulder, said everybody delighted in being around Hamilton.

"He was the sort of fellow you needed to be around. From a logical stance exceptionally shrewd and extremely astute, yet he had a fabulous time. He was simply extremely friendly," said Abdalati, who'd worked in the past with Hamilton in Greenland. "There was only something about Gordon. You cherished being around him."

The National Science Foundation, which was subsidizing Hamilton's examination, was organizing the arrival of his body to the United States, a representative said.

"The demise of one of our associates is a shocking indication of the dangers we as a whole face — regardless of how hard we work at alleviating those dangers — in field examine," Kelly K. Falkner, executive of the National Science Foundation's division of polar projects, said in an announcement.