Ice Core Drilling in West Antarctica

Heidi Roop grew up exploring the formerly glaciated landscape of Wisconsin, and today continues her love for studying glaciers and climate variability through research in Antarctica and alpine regions around the world. Spending the austral summer of 2010-2011 in Antarctica, it will be her second season working as a part of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Divide project. When she is not in Antarctica, she works throughout the Sierra Nevada studying climate variability and hydrology for the United States Geological Survey.

Bruce Vaughn is the Co-Founder and Manager of the Stable Isotope Lab at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) (http://instaar.colorado.edu/) at the University of Colorado. The Stable Isotope Lab is devoted to studying biogeochemical processes that control environmental change on human timescales, and works to develop new techniques for measuring environmental stable isotopes. A Field Leader for the project, Mr. Vaughn has extensive research experience worldwide, including: Greenland, Antarctica, equatorial Pacific, Alaska, Ecuador, and the Cascades and Rocky Mountains.

Ken Taylor is a Research Professor at the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada and the Principal Investigator and Chief Scientist for the WAIS Divide Ice Core Drilling Project. Dr. Taylor has worked with ice cores in Greenland and Antarctica, and has also spent time traveling around the world studying water quality issues.

A PhD candidate at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, CA, Anais Orsi studies the history of climate by analyzing gases in air bubbles trapped in ice cores. She has been involved with WAIS-divide for three years. When she is not in Antarctica, she melts ice samples in her lab to release the gases, to learn about West Antarctic climate during the last 1,000 years.