South Pole

The thermostat may read 90 degrees Fahrenheit outside the sprawling federal research complex in Lakewood, Colorado, but inside, CU Boulder undergraduate student Casey Vanderheyden is donning a bulky winter coat, gloves and boots as though she is headed to the South Pole.

The International Glaciological Society (IGS) has awarded the Society's Richardson Medal to Dr. Julie Palais, a long standing member of the IGS.

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."

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.

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

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.

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.

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.