CReSIS Greenland Ice Sheet Studies
Meet the Team
K-12 Science Coordinator - Cheri Hamilton
Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets (CReSIS)
Lawrence
, Kansas
United States
Cheri Hamilton is currently the K-12 Education Coordinator for the Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets (CReSIS). Funded by the National Science Foundation, this science and technology center is located in Lawrence, Kansas at Kansas University, and develops new technologies and computer models to measure and predict the response of sea level change to the mass balance of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. As part of her outreach, Ms. Hamilton developed a hands-on activity program called “Ice, Ice, Baby” which is taught in K-8 classrooms in the Topeka and Kansas City public schools. She presents at teacher workshops and conferences as well. Ms. Hamilton has a master’s degree in curriculum and instruction from Kansas University. Since teaching elementary school, Ms. Hamilton has taught in many informal science programs including EarthWorks, Kansas Starbase, and the Challenger Learning Center.
Researcher - Dorthe Dahl-Jensen
University of Copenhagen
Copenhagen
Denmark
Coming Soon.
Journals
June 18, 2009 Back to Work!
It is back to work for me at the University of Kansas! Today 26 students and five chaperones from Eaton Academy Charter School in Eastpointe, Michigan visited us at the Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets.I gave them a brief presentation about our center and the research we do.
I also showed...
June 7, 2009 Departing the Ice
It's 3:30 PM and we all are waiting for the plane to land. The whole camp is out here to help load, say goodbye and greet the new team members. Seventeen new people arrived in camp and eleven departed. Our camp did have 24 members. How many does Sarah have to cook for now? (Answer at the bottom...
June 7, 2009 Kangerlussuaq Field Trip
Lars Berg Larsen, the Field operation Manager of NEEM took us on a field trip on our last day in Greenland. He said we were going to the "ice edge". At first, we saw so many giant hills of rocks and a lot of boulders.
Evidence of glacial rocks were everywhere you looked.
Every once in...
June 4, 2009 Penguin Sighting
Why is it odd that camp members kept seeing a penguin in their camp? It's on the ice, isn't it? Oh, penguins don't live in the north! They live in Antarctica!
June 4, 2009 The Weather Balloon
It’s 9:45AM Thursday and the camp launched a weather balloon! It is a red balloon filled with helium that is just let go in the wind. The sky is so grey today and we need to know if the cloud ceiling is too low for the plane to land. The cloud ceiling needs to be 2,000 feet or higher...
Project Information
Validation and Calibration of High Resolution CReSIS Radar Data
NEEM Camp, Greenland
22 May 2009
8 June 2009
Where are They?
The NEEM drill site is on top of the Greenland ice sheet, where the ice is 2.5 km thick. The NEEM team spent much of the 2008 research season constructing a camp at the site. The majority of the ice core drilling will take place during the summers of 2009-2011, during which the camp will accommodate about 30 researchers and technicians for 3-4 months.
What are they Doing?
Much of our knowledge of past climate comes from ice cores drilled from the Greenland ice sheet. These records stretch back more than 100,000 years, but existing ice cores do not include clear records from the Eemian stage, the second-to-latest interglacial period, which occurred about 130,000 years ago. During this period, evidence indicates that temperatures were about 3-5 ˚C warmer than present, so more information would help us understand and predict how our climate is likely to evolve in the warming future.
Under the North Greenland Eemian (NEEM) ice drilling project, an international team of researchers is working to obtain complete and undisturbed layers of ice from the Eemian by drilling a new core in northwest Greenland. Choosing the right spot to drill is critically important to the project’s success. NEEM scientists collaborated with researchers from the Center for the Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets (CReSIS) at the University of Kansas. The CReSIS team provided Radar Echo Sounding profiles over the ice sheet, which provided information on ice layer thickness and variability over time and space and helped NEEM researchers select the drill site.
The NEEM team will begin deep drilling at the site in 2009, and CReSIS scientists will be able to compare the detailed information collected from the core with their radar data in order to better understand variations in snow accumulation and other environmental parameters. This will improve the accuracy of the Radar Echo Sounding profiles.
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