Antarctica

In 2011 a team of researchers led by Vasilii Petrenko, an assistant professor of Earth and environmental sciences at the University of Rochester, spent seven weeks in Antarctica collecting and studying 2,000-pound samples of glacial ice cores that date back nearly 12,000 years.

New findings published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) by Desert Research Institute (DRI) Professor Joseph R. McConnell, Ph.D., and colleagues document a 192-year series of volcanic eruptions in Antarctica that coincided with accelerated deglaciation about 17,700 years ago.

With 10 of the world's only ski-equipped LC-130 Hercules aircraft, commonly referred to as a Skibird, the New York Air National Guard's 109th Airlift Wing is able to provide the airlift needed to get to remote locations in Antarctica and Greenland in support of the National Science Foundation.

The hum of an LC-130 Skibird taking off on a crisp upstate New York morning marked the 109th Airlift Wing's annual migration south on Oct. 17.

Gordon Hamilton, a University of Maine professor in the School of Earth and Climate Sciences, and a researcher with the Climate Change Institute, died in a field accident Oct. 22 while conducting research in Antarctica.

When one is already in possession of the world's oldest chunk of ice, perhaps it's only natural to want to go older. John Higgins, a Princeton University assistant professor of geosciences, led a team of researchers who reported in 2015 the recovery of a 1-million-year-old ice core from the remote Allan Hills of Antarctica, the oldest ice ever recorded by scientists.

As the winch extracted a two-meter-long cylinder of ancient ice in late December, Murat Aydin looked on. "If we can keep this pace up we should be able to hit 1,600 meters," he said. "This is going to be the deepest ice core drilled at the South Pole by quite a margin."

Analysis indicates that northern temperature changes led corresponding southern patterns by 200 years.

The South Pole is a very cold place, with an average annual temperature of around minus 50 degrees Celsius.

Thinking back to the daily life at South Pole sometimes feels like a dream. However, the hundreds of pictures I took and the 500+ meters of ice core sitting in the archive freezer at the National Ice Core Laboratory prove that it really happened.

In Mark Twickler's world, "small" is relative. When it comes to a new ice core drill that's being developed and tested by a team of specialized engineers from the Ice Drilling Design and Operations group, small means about 20,000 pounds.

Antarctica conjures many different images depending on the imagination. Ice. Cold. Penguins. For Sarah Aciego, it's dust.

Bess Koffman enjoys getting dusty in the name of science. Currently a postdoctoral scientist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Koffman recently returned from New Zealand's South Island.

Efforts continue to mitigate effects of October's partial government shutdown.

The South Pole Ice Core project is a U.S. effort funded by the National Science Foundation to drill and recover a new ice core from South Pole, Antarctica. The ice core will be drilled to a depth of 1500 meters and provide records of stable isotopes, aerosols, and atmospheric gases spanning ~40,000 years.

When I was asked to write about my experience working in the Allan Hills, I could scarcely think of where to begin: the beauty? the wind?

Around 11,500 years ago the methane content of the atmosphere increased by about 50% in as little as 200 years.

After a ~16-day weather delay, RPSC opened WAIS Divide via a Basler on November 8 with a seven person put-in team

The 2010 core processing line (CPL) was extremely successful. It was the most complex cut plan and the most ice (~1,365 meters) that the U.S. ice core community has ever pushed through a CPL in a summer.

It's midsummer in Denver, and the city has been baking under a heat wave for a couple of months. But in one small corner of the sprawling Denver Federal Center campus in the nearby suburb of Lakewood, about a dozen people are bundled up in thickly insulated Carhartt jumpsuits, wool caps, scarves and gloves.

Explorations for life in Earth's deep terrestrial and oceanic subsurface have revealed an astonishing reality: most of the microbes on Earth exist deep within the planet's crust.

Core recovery for the 2009/2010 drilling season ended as scheduled on January 25 at a bottom depth of 2560 meters. A total of 1049 meters of ice were drilled and the season's core quality was excellent.

When I applied to the PolarTREC program, I was asked where I would prefer to go given the options of the Arctic, Antarctica, or either.

Jackie Hams' essay on her visit to Antarctica is part of a project that studies ancient ice buried in the Dry Valleys, Antarctica. David Marchant of Boston University and Michael Bender of Princeton University are collaborators on the project that is collecting this old ice.

The oldest ice core retrieved from Antarctica - and the world - travels back about 850,000 years in time, revealing eight previous ice ages.

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Divide camp opened for the 2009/10 season on Nov-2 (local time). After a 5.5-hour direct flight from McMurdo Station via Basler aircraft, the camp put-in team, led by camp manager Theresa "T" Tran, arrived to WAIS Divide after 10 days of weather delays.

When people ask me "How was Antarctica?", I inevitably respond, "It was white!" WAIS Divide resembles most deep ice coring field camps: the white ice sheet extends to the horizon like a frozen sea.

During the austral summer of 1911-12, Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott led the first overland expeditions to reach the geographic South Pole. Imagine for a moment, what it must have been like to stand at the most southerly point on the globe for the first time.

Despite a two-week delay due to budget cuts and heavy equipment problems at camp, the second field season of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Divide Ice Core Project was extremely successful.

Changing global climate is forcing scientists to vigorously test the existing paradigms and to find improved evidence of how the climate system really works at various time scales.

From the early 1950's through the mid-1960's, U.S. polar ice coring research was led by two U.S. Army Corps of Engineers research labs: the Snow, Ice, and Permafrost Research Establishment (SIPRE), and later, the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL).

The third season for the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Divide Ice Core Project ended on 05 February 2008. The inaugural season of deep drilling with the Deep Ice Sheet Coring (DISC) Drill went very well and core quality was excellent.

In late 2006, a team from the University of Washington visited the WAIS Divide field camp in West Antarctica to investigate the distribution of annual-scale layers upstream of the WAIS Divide ice coring site. This upstream area is of considerable importance for the WAIS Divide ice core because this is where all of the ice found in the ice core originally fell as snow.

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Divide Ice Core project is progressing very well. In June we processed the top 110 meters of the main ice core drilled during the 2006/2007 field season at the National Ice Core Laboratory (NICL) in Denver, CO.

WAIS Divide is a United States deep ice core project in West Antarctica funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The purpose of the project is to collect a 3,400 meter deep ice core from the flow divide (similar to a watershed divide) in central West Antarctica in order to develop records for the last 100,000 years of: global climate, the stability of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), and biological activity.

In March, 2004 the National Science Foundation supported a workshop proposal submitted by National Ice Core Laboratory-Science Management Office to gather the world’s premier ice core scientists, engineers and drillers to establish a formal plan for utilizing the strengths and expertise of each nation to promote future ice core projects and to develop focused research objectives.

A new ice coring partnership between the U.S. and Norway will enable scientific investigations along two overland traverses in East Antarctica: one going from the Norwegian Troll Station (72º S, 2º E) to the United States South Pole Station (90º S, 0º E) in 2007-2008; and a return traverse starting at South Pole Station and ending at Troll Station by a different route in 2008-2009.

The International Trans Antarctic Scientific Expedition (ITASE) is a multi-national (20 nations), multi-disciplinary field research program focused on understanding the recent environmental history of Antarctica and the Southern Ocean through overland traverses of Antarctica.

The International Polar Year 2007–2008 will be the largest internationally coordinated research program in 50 years. It will be an intensive period of interdisciplinary science focused on the Arctic and the Antarctic.

The one stop gateway to ice core data is held at the Antarctic Glaciological Data Center (AGDC), the World Data Center for Paleoclimatology, and the Arctic System Science Coordination Center (ARCSS).