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Wednesday, January 23, 2008 New Antarctic Ice Core to Provide Clearest Climate Record Yet Scripps researchers part of multi-year paleoclimate study Scripps Institution of Oceanography / University of California, San Diego After enduring months on the coldest, driest and windiest continent on Earth, researchers including climate scientists from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego today closed out the inaugural season on an unprecedented, multi-year effort to retrieve the most detailed record of greenhouse gases in Earth's atmosphere over the last 100,000 years.Working as part of the National Science Foundation's West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide (WAIS Divide) Ice Core Project, a team of scientists, engineers, technicians and students from multiple U.S. institutions have recovered a 580-meter (1,900-foot) ice core - the first section of what is hoped to be a two-mile-long column of ice detailing 100,000 years of Earth's climate history, including a precise year-by-year record of the last 40,000 years.  Scientist Rebecca Anderson of the Desert Research Institute examines a section of the WAIS Divide ice core recovered from a depth of 500 meters. Photo courtesy of Kendrick Taylor. Part of the new ice core will go to Scripps, where it will be analyzed for trapped atmospheric gases such as argon, krypton and nitrogen that reveal past temperature changes. Graduate student Anais Orsi, who works with Scripps geoscientist Jeff Severinghaus, is focusing her doctoral dissertation on the question of whether the "Little Ice Age" event that began around the year 1400 manifested itself in Antarctica to the extent that it did in much of the rest of the word. Orsi is currently in Antarctica working as a member of the science team. WAIS Divide, named for the high-elevation region that is the boundary separating opposing flow directions on the ice sheet, is the best spot on the planet to recover ancient ice containing trapped air bubbles - samples of the Earth's atmosphere from the present to as far back as 100,000 years ago. While other ice cores have been used to develop longer records of Earth's atmosphere, the record from WAIS Divide will offer a more detailed study of the relationship between previous increases in greenhouse gases and climate change. This information will improve computer models that are used to predict how the current unprecedented high levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere caused by human activity will influence future climate.  Scripps Oceanography graduate student Anais Orsi at the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Orsi is part of a multi-institutional project to extract cores of Antarctic ice that bear a paleoclimate record extending back 100,000 years. The new core will also allow investigations of biological material in deep ice, which will yield information about biogeochemical processes that control and are controlled by climate, as well as lead to fundamental insights about life on Earth. "We are very excited to work with ancient ice that fell as snow as long as 100,000 years ago," said Taylor. "We read the ice like other people might read a stack of old weather reports." The WAIS project took more than 15 years of planning and preparation, including extensive airborne reconnaissance and ground-based geophysical research, to pinpoint the one-square-kilometer (less than a square mile) space on the 932,000-square-kilometer (360,000-square-mile) ice sheet that scientists believe will provide the clearest climate record for the last 100,000 years. With only some 40 days a year when the weather is warm enough for drilling - yesterday's temperature was a balmy -15 degrees Celsius (5 degrees Fahrenheit) - it is expected to take until January 2010 to complete the fieldwork. For the project, Ice Coring and Drilling Services of the University of Wisconsin-Madison built and is operating a state-of-the-art, deep ice-coring drill, which is more like a piece of scientific equipment than a conventional rock drill used in petroleum exploration. The U.S. Geological Survey National Ice Core Laboratory in Denver designed the core handling system. Raytheon Polar Services Corporation provides the logistical support. The NSF Office of Polar Programs-U.S. Antarctic Program funds the project. The core will be archived at the National Ice Core Laboratory, which is run by the USGS with funding from NSF. # # # Note to broadcast and cable producers: University of California, San Diego provides an on-campus satellite uplink facility for live or pre-recorded television interviews. Please phone or e-mail the media contact listed above to arrange an interview. Scripps Institution of Oceanography, at University of California, San Diego, is one of the oldest, largest and most important centers for global science research and education in the world. The National Research Council has ranked Scripps first in faculty quality among oceanography programs nationwide Now in its second century of discovery, the scientific scope of the institution has grown to include biological, physical, chemical, geological, geophysical and atmospheric studies of the earth as a system. Hundreds of research programs covering a wide range of scientific areas are under way today in 65 countries. The institution has a staff of about 1,300, and annual expenditures of approximately $155 million from federal, state and private sources. Scripps operates one of the largest U.S. academic fleets with four oceanographic research ships and one research platform for worldwide exploration. |
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