Ice Core Drilling in West Antarctica
Update
Meet the Team
Researcher - Heidi Roop
Heidi Roop grew up exploring the formerly glaciated landscape of Wisconsin, and today continues her love for studying glaciers and climate change through her research focused on reconstructing the glacial and climatic history of two watersheds in the Ahklun Mountains of Alaska. This is Ms. Roop's fourth field season in Alaska where prolonged rain cannot dampen her spirits or her love of fieldwork! This will be Heidi's third experience with PolarTREC, and she is thrilled to share her passion and excitement with Ms. Peterson and her students.
Researcher - Bruce Vaughn
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.
Researcher - Ken Taylor
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.
Researcher - Anais Orsi
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.
Journals
Jan 31st: End of the Season
Jan. 25th Last Day of Drilling
DISC Drill in action!
January 20, 2010 WAIS Work Commute [Video]
PolarTREC Unite!
Project Information
Where are They?
The research team will be at the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) drill site, in western Antarctica. The WAIS divide sits on top of 3,485 meters of ice, thicker than 9 Empire State Buildings stacked on top of one another! The WAIS is classified as a marine-based ice sheet, meaning that its bed lies well below sea level and its edges flow into floating ice shelves. The WAIS is bounded by the Ross Ice Shelf, the Ronne Ice Shelf, and outlet glaciers that drain into the Amundsen Sea.
What are they Doing?
Using a large hollow drill, the WAIS Divide Ice Core Drilling team aims to collect a 3,500-meter-long ice core, or sample of ice, from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Because of the weight of the overlying snowpack, snow that falls and accumulates on ice sheets re-crystallizes and forms annual layers over time. The ice core recovered during the project will have annual resolution, or distinct yearly markings, for the past 40,000 years!
In ice sheets, the compression of snow traps small bubbles of air in the layers of ice. By measuring concentrations of greenhouse gasses and non-greenhouse gasses and their isotopes trapped within bubbles in the ice, the team aims to develop climate records dating back to 100,000 years before present.
This ice core will provide the first Southern Hemisphere climate and greenhouse gas records of comparable time, resolution, and duration to ice cores previously recovered in Greenland. The ice core will enable scientists to make detailed comparisons of greenhouse gas concentrations and environmental conditions between the Northern and Southern hemispheres with a greater level of detail than previously possible. The biology of the ice collected will also be investigated.
Learn more about this process through a very interesting 20-minute video!
Vocabulary
- Climate
- Climate Change
- Ice Core
- Ice Core Record
- Ice Divide
- Paleoatmosphere
- Paleoclimate Reconstruction
The average weather over a particular region of the Earth. Climate originates in recurring weather phenomenon that result from specific types of atmospheric circulation.
A statistically significant variation in either the mean state of the climate or the mean variability of the climate that persists for an extended period (typically 10 years or more). Climate change may result from such factors as changes in solar activity, long-period changes in the Earth's orbital elements, natural internal processes of the climate system, or anthropogenic forcing (for example, increasing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases).
A cylindrical section of ice removed from a glacier or an ice sheet using a specialized type of hollow drill. Enter the definition here.
A record taken from a core sample from the accumulation of snow and ice over many years that have re-crystallized and have trapped air bubbles from previous time periods. The composition of ice cores, and the presence of certain isotopes, provides a picture of the climate at the time the snowfall accumulated.
An ice divide is analogous to a watershed divide. An ice sheet divide separates opposing flow directions of ice on an ice sheet.
The Earth’s atmosphere in the past. Ice cores are one tool for reconstructing the Earth’s paleoatmospheres because ice contains gas bubbles that reflect the atmosphere when the bubbles formed.
The determination of past states of Earth’s climate (prior to historical or instrumental records) created by interpreting the climate signals contained in natural recorders such as tree rings, ice cores, deep sea and lake sediments, and cave deposits. Also, a reconstruction of past climates based on a model that uses paleoclimate data.