Heidi Roop will be finishing her master’s degree in geology at Northern Arizona University this fall before heading south to Antarctica to participate in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Divide Ice Core Drilling project. Heidi has spent the last four years conducting research across the Arctic and sub-Arctic, primarily in Alaska where she worked on reconstructing North Pacific climate variations using lake sediment cores. Having conducted climate-related research in the Arctic, she is excited to expand her horizons, learn first-hand about Antarctic climate variability, and work with a new medium—ice cores! She will be celebrating her 25th birthday in Antarctica and wonders where in the world she might be on her 26th birthday! Bruce Vaughn is the Co-Founder and Manager of the Stable Isotope Lab at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) 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. 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. 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.

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.