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Pages and Posts Tagged ‘ice core’


Frozen History

Heidi Roop is part of a team more than 100 scientists collecting and analyzing a 2-mile-long (3.5-km-long) ice core from the West Antarctica Ice Sheet (WAIS) Divide. The WAIS team estimates that this ice core will reveal climate changes that have happened as far back as 100,000 years, a time when woolly mammoths still walked the earth. {Read More »}



Age Matters

MCMURDO STATION, ANTARCTICA-- The primary science objective for our field team this season is to core buried glacier ice to depths of 40+ meters. The outstanding question is, how old is the ice?... {Read More »}



The Oldest Ice on Earth?

Scientists suspect that a buried alpine glacier in the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica may be over 8 million years old. If true, it's the oldest ice yet discovered on our planet and may contain an archive of climate data stretching back to the time of the earliest hominids. {Read More »}



A Rare Greenlandic Snow Penguin Sighting

NEEM CAMP, GREENLAND-- The question that I probably get asked most often (besides “did you see any penguins?”) about my trips to the poles is what evidence I’ve seen for climate change... {Read More »}



In the Trenches

NEEM CAMP, GREENLAND-- Over at the deep drilling site, work continues day and night. There are two shifts of drillers and core handlers who work around the clock... {Read More »}



Hello from NEEM!

NEEM CAMP, GREENLAND-- After yesterday's Herc flight from Kangerlussuaq on the coast to the NEEM drilling camp on the Greenland ice sheet in which we circled camp several times but were not able to land due to thick ground fog (and diminishing fuel!), today we were able to land at camp. Finally... {Read More »}



Welcome to Greenland!

KANGERLUSSUAQ, GREENLAND-- Today Kaitlin Keegan, a first year PhD student at Dartmouth College, and my field assistant, and I flew from Scotia, NY, to Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, our first stop on the way up to the Danish deep drilling camp, NEEM... {Read More »}



Pure as the Driven Snow

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA -- (By Lisa Strong-Aufhauser) Even the snow on top of the Greenland ice sheet is not as pure as you’d think. Dr. Joe McConnell from the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada, studies the impurities... {Read More »}



The Stuck Drill Story

RECOVERY LAKES, ANTARCTICA-- Leaving site 5! Today we are finally on the move again, after a prolonged stay at our science stop at site 5 in the middle of the Recovery Lakes area. We were delayed after our ice core drill was stuck 90m down in the hole Lou was drilling... {Read More »}



Devil Snow

RECOVERY LAKES, ANTARCTICA-- We've spent the last 3 weeks, the majority of our science days, in a region known as Recovery Lakes, or the Lake District as we affectionately call it. This system of several lakes, recently discovered, are subglacial-- that is, they are below... {Read More »}