Glaciology

    

Right: Glaciologist digging a snow pit on the Antarctic ice sheet 

Snow and ice are pervasive elements of high latitude environmental systems and have an active role in the global environment. The glaciology program is concerned with the study of the history and dynamics of all naturally occurring forms of snow and ice, including floating ice, seasonal snow, glaciers, and continental and marine ice sheets. Program emphases include paleoenvironments from ice cores, ice dynamics, numerical modeling, glacial geology, and remote sensing of ice sheets. Some specific objectives include the correlation of climatic fluctuations evident in Antarctic ice cores with data from arctic and lower-latitude ice cores, the integration of the ice record with the terrestrial and marine records, the investigation of the physics of fast glacier flow with emphasis on processes at glacier beds, the investigation of ice-shelf stability and the identification and quantification of the feedback between ice dynamics and climate change. These topics come together in the multidisciplinary West Antarctic Ice Sheet program .  

 

Left: Glaciologist traveling an ice stream in west Antarctica 

 

West Antarctic Ice Sheet program (WAIS), a major initiative of the Office of Polar Programs, focused in the Antarctic Glaciology Program and Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program .The WAIS program is designed to advance a better understanding of the West Antarctic ice sheet. Scientists involved in the WAIS program want to know what triggers marine ice sheet collapse and evaluate the possibility that this could happen in West Antarctica. Predicting the ice sheet's future behavior requires an understanding of its history, current state, internal dynamics and coupling to the current global climate. 

Ice cores from Antarctica are important in order to determine whether the rapid climate changes recorded in Northern Hemisphere ice cores, such as those obtained from Summit, Greenland in the Greenland Ice Sheet Project II (GISP2), occurred globally. The only area where an ice core capable of providing a long, annual resolution history of Southern Hemisphere climate exists is in the interior of West Antarctica, where compressed snow layers are thick enough to allow absolute dating. The objective of the WAISCORES- Siple Dome ice coring program is to obtain such a core.  

The ice cores to be drilled as part of the WAISCORES program will also complement those already under study from Taylor Dome and Vostok Station in East Antarctica. Ice cores are unique in that they continuously record and preserve annual precipitation, atmospheric temperature and components of the atmosphere, including gases, soluble and insoluble

Above: Siple Dome ice core drilling site

aerosol particles from a variety of sources (biogenic, terrestrial, solar, marine, volcanic, anthropogenic). Recent work on the Vostok ice core has lead to important advances in understanding past climate and environmental changes over glacial-interglacial cycles. Future work in this area should focus on developing a long interhemispheric record of paleoclimate which can be correlated with the deep sea core record.  

These cores will provide samples for future research for many years to come. Cores are currently in storage at the National Ice Core Laboratory . NICL is a government-owned facility for storing, curating, and studying ice cores recovered from the ice-covered regions of the world. NICL is supported through an Interagency Cooperative Agreement with the United States Geological Survey. NICL provides NSF- and USGS-funded principal investigators and their collaborators with the capability to conduct examinations and measurements of ice cores while preserving the integrity of these cores in a safeguarded environment. 

 
Right: The Ross Ice Shelf, also known as "The barrier" by early explorers 

In addition to the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Program, the Antarctic Glaciology Program has a number of other areas of focus. One of the main areas of interest relates to the determination of the Cenozoic history of the Antarctic ice sheet, including the uplift of the Transantarctic Mountains and its interaction with global climate (e.g. response to the Pliocene warming). Much of the glacial geological research in the Transantarctic Mountains relate to understanding the history of the ice sheet during the Pliocene, as well as more recent fluctuations during the Quaternary. 

 

Left: Shallow ice core drilling at Dome C, East Antarctica. 

The Space Science and Engineering Center (SSEC) at University of Wisconsin, Madison is supported by the Office of Polar Programs to meet the drilling requirements of all programs in OPP. SSEC focuses on ice drill development for NSF-supported remote field projects. Investigators who plan to request technical support from SSEC should include with their proposal a cost estimate (budget and justification) for the equipment or drilling support that might be provided by SSEC if the project is funded. This information is in addition to the regular budgets included with the proposal. Investigators should contact SSEC if they have questions or need further information for a correct cost estimate. The Research Support Manager in the Polar Research Support Section, as well as the program manager to whom you are submitting your proposal, should be notified when an investigator is requesting SSEC support. 

 

Left: Diagram of West Antarctic Ice Sheet 

An ice sheet covers all but 2.4 per cent of Antarctica's 14 million square kilometers. At its thickest point the ice sheet is 4,776 meters deep. It averages 2,160 meters thick, making Antarctica the highest continent. This ice is 90 percent of all the world's ice, and it is 70 percent of all the world's fresh water. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet contains more than 3.2 million cubic kilometers of ice, is the last ice sheet on Earth resting in a deep marine basin and is the most likely player in any future, rapid sea level rise. Marine-based ice sheets are inherently unstable and vulnerable to rapid collapse. This is known from glacial geologic studies of land and marine based deposits in the northern hemisphere, where most of these marine ice sheets once existed. Complete collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet would rapidly raise global sea level by about 6 m.