We think that the dark band in this ice core is a tephra layer, or a volcanic ash deposit.

It is very rare to see such layers with the naked eye in ice cores so we all feel very lucky. Enjoy this video with our ice chemistry expert Dr. Ryan Banta as he explains more about this layer and ice core chemistry.

Enjoy this video about the process, including the take-off of a C-130 full of ice from WAIS Divide.

In all, we are having no trouble staying busy! Next up, getting the core processing line set-up for the new ice cores that we will begin drilling next week!

An ice core.

We work in shifts for the packaging because it is easy to get tired and cold in our working environment. Part of ensuring the ice cores do not get damaged, and that they maintain their utility for different chemical and physical analyses, is making sure that the ice cores get no warmer than -20°C. So, the building where the cores are stored and packaged is cooled to -25 °C! It is hard to believe but often the air temperature outside is around 10°C warmer than where we work!

The drilling and ice core handling facility at the start of the 2008/2009 field season.

As we learn the packing process (I will go into more detail in another blog), we are also learning all of the nuances of staying warm for extended periods of time at -25°C. My technique, that I learned from the veteran ice core handlers, is to keep the core of your body really warm and that way your fingers and toes get enough warm blood to not get too cold. On top I wear 2 wool tops, a wool sweater and two down jackets. On the bottom, I wear two pairs of wool longer underwear and insulated bib overalls. Thick socks and boot liners with my sturdy blue boots keep my toes warm. Surprisingly, with all of the layers keeping the core of my body warm, I can get by with some light gloves on my hands!

Heidi covered in frost after work in a -25ºC environment.

Another trick, and one that I like the best, is eating LOTS of food. Both the galley where we eat and the warming hut where we can take breaks are stocked with cookies, crackers, and candy bars! It is not uncommon to eat 3 candy bars a day! I rarely eat candy at home so it is quite a nice treat to eat so much candy and know that my body is using all of the calories just to stay warm!

I am off to work now but I hope to get more posted soon! There is so much to share! Stay tuned for how to sleep in a tent in Antarctica, the ins and outs of a hot shower at WAIS Divide and much, much more about ice cores and they story they can tell! I will do my best to get photos posted too but internet is a real luxury here and we only have 5 hours of satellite internet a day! Sending photos is against the rules but I will try to figure something out!

We began drilling the glacier ice and despite the weather conditions the day started well as we were recovering beautiful, clean, bubbly glacier ice. But soon the borehole reached a small sandy-pebbly layer within the ice and the pace of drilling came to a crawl. Drilling sediment rich ice releases enough heat to melt the ice between the sand grains. When the drill slows down the ice quickly refreezes and makes a sand ice slurry (yes, I referred to it as “crap” in the video) which adheres to the auger like cement making cleaning an arduous process.

The round depression on the top of the recovered slurry core was caused by the down-hole vacuum which assists in removing broken up rock and ice cemented debris created during drilling. Material not removed by the vacuum is hopefully recovered via use of the core barrel as shown in this video. After a few more cleaning runs with the vacuum and core barrel, we were back into clean ice once again!

The edge of the sea ice viewed north from the helicopter just 30 minutes outside of McMurdo.

View from the helicopter during our trip up the Ferrar Valley.

The 90 minute helicopter flight to Beacon Valley allowed me to reflect on the conveniences one takes for granted such as running water, warm showers, and simple means of communicating back to one’s family and friends. I will miss that. I won’t have such niceties until I return to McMurdo but at the same time the thought of my science objectives and potential for discovery that will occur between now and the next time I set foot in McMurdo has me excited to begin the field season!

Helicopter “zero-eight-hotel” leaving our Beacon Valley camp after dropping us off at the start of the field season.

We arrived into Beacon Valley to one of the most eerie / thrilling experiences of the entire Antarctic adventure. After the helicopter drops you and your camp gear off and fades away in the distance you are left in a totally foreign and cold environment.

Total silence.

You realize you are very much isolated from what we call the “real world”.

Lead driller Tanner (blue jacket) and others looking for clean glacier ice for our initial drill site.

Initial drill site. Excavation down 20-30cm to the buried glacier ice. Note the unweathered rocks “coming out” of the ice surface. As the ice sublimates (evaporates) the material in the ice moves towards the surface.

The following day the field team excavated glacial sediment to expose buried iced in search for good drilling locations (i.e. regions of clean ice). Today the helicopter transported the drilling equipment to the site, we set up the drill, and we took our first core of beautiful glacial ice this afternoon. The drill is working perfectly and we are all in good spirits.

Drilling operations.

Field freezer. Our temporary repository for ice cores before being shipped back to McMurdo.

Chief Scientist Ken Taylor and science tech Anais Orsi looking at layers in backlit snowpit.

A one-meter long piece of ice core illuminated with a light. The green netting on the core is used to help hold the ice together in case it spontaneously fractures.

The bubbles visible in this piece from an Antarctic ice core sample contain carbon dioxide and other gases that were trapped in the ice when formed thousands of years ago. Researchers carefully crush the piece and capture the gases that escape when the bubbles break. This allows them to better understand what carbon dioxide levels were over time.

Heidi Roop, a science technician, worked with more than 100 scientists to recover a 2-mile-long (3.5-km-long) ice core from the West Antarctica Ice Sheet (WAIS) Divide. Imagine, that’s a column of ice twice as tall as the Grand Canyon is deep! The properties of each layer of an ice core reveal a slice of climate history. 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.

During the 2009–2010 season, Heidi helped the WAIS team uncover new chapters of the climate story by drilling deeper into the ice. The WAIS scientists were able to decipher the climate year by year back approximately 40,000 years and at decadal (10-year) resolution from 40,000 to 100,000 years, making it the most detailed ice core record ever collected in the Southern Hemisphere. With the ability to extract annual (1-year) to decadal climate information such as past greenhouse gas concentrations, the climate record developed from WAIS can be directly related to ice cores from Greenland. By comparing records from the Southern and Northern hemispheres, our understanding of global climate change will be more complete. The earth’s climate history will be known in more detail than ever before—and it’s bound to be an interesting story!

Early drill and recovery attempts of the buried glacier ice.

Sediment lenses cross cutting through a 30 cm ice core.

The outstanding question is how old is the ice? Ash deposits overlying the ice are dated to as old as 8.1 Ma (million years ago) which would make the underlying glacier the oldest ice yet discovered on our planet. To further convince skeptics that the ice is indeed old, the principal investigators of the grant (David Marchant, Boston University, and Michael Bender, Princeton University) are attempting to date the age of the ice directly.

An in-situ ash wedge in debris overlying buried ice. The wedge is approximately 30 cm across and 40 cm tall. Such deposits can be dated to give a minimum age for the overlying glacial debris.

To understand how this is done we need to go back to when the planet was forming 4.6 billion years ago. Since the formation of the earth, there has been a slow release of gas from the interior of the planet to the atmosphere (i.e. degassing via volcanic activity). One gas in particular is an isotope of Argon. This isotope does not decay thus its concentration is slowly building up in the earth’s atmosphere over time. Atmospheric gas trapped in old ice would have less Argon isotope compared to recently formed glacier ice. The principal investigators will use this technique to analyze the gases trapped within the glacier ice we collect during this field season and determine an age of the ice. If indeed it is the oldest ice yet found on earth, we will have the opportunity to directly measure important greenhouse gases such as CO2 at timescale millions of years back into earth’s history.

Standing in a polygon trough on a snowy day in Beacon Valley.

Helicopter day trip away from our main camp in Beacon Valley.

Coring of the underlying glacial ice, Beacon Valley.

Beacon Valley: home for the next 7 weeks.

Taking orientation of sand veins within the buried ice.

A collapse of the Antarctic ice sheets would raise global sea levels approximately 180 feet (60 m) with devastating consequences for near-shore and low-elevation communities. To better understand the response of the Antarctic ice sheets to future changes in climate, quantitative geomophologist Doug Kowalewski and colleagues from Boston University are working to understand the ancient climate of Antarctica and the corresponding stability of the glaciers and ice sheets. Buried alpine glacier ice was discovered two decades ago in the McMurdo Dry Valleys, a predominantly ice-free region roughly the size of Rhode Island. The buried glacier is allegedly the oldest on earth with an age of more than 8 million years; that would be almost ten times older than ice currently being cored from the Antarctic ice sheets.

If the ice is indeed that old, gases trapped within the buried glacier ice represent a potential archive of climate data stretching back to the time of the earliest hominids. Doug Kowalewski (UMass, Amherst) along with colleagues from Boston University, Brown University and Colgate spent October to December camped in Beacon Valley (77.859 S, 160.574 E) coring the alpine glacier ice. The ice cores were shipped to Boston and Princeton universities where analysis of the trapped gases will provide a more robust chronology for the glacier and provide insight about past atmospheric temperatures and precipitation.

To establish further evidence that buried glaciers can persist for over 8 million years in the dry, albeit cold environment of Antarctica, Doug conducted in-situ experiments and modeling studies to calculate the existing rate of glacier ice sublimation (the change of state from solid directly to gas, a process that slowly reduces the size of glacier and over time may eliminate the glacier completely). Doug also ran regional climate model simulations at the UMass Amherst Climate System Research Center to resolve whether sustained cold climate conditions necessary for long-term ice preservation occurred during the lifetime of the glacier specifically during warmer times in Earth’s history (episodes of higher atmospheric CO2 and increased solar radiation due to Earth’s orbital changes). For model input, Doug and his colleagues monitored atmospheric temperatures, wind speed, amount of solar radiation received, and relative humidity. Glacier ice temperatures and overlying rock and soil temperatures were monitored in Beacon Valley. These modeling efforts provide increased evidence that buried ice and a super-arid, cold-polar climate have sustained in parts of Antarctica for millions of years.

Doug Kowalewski’s field site, Beacon Valley (yellow square), sits at 1500 m in elevation and is in close proximity to the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (left of image).

Current assessments of the past and present climate and predictions of future climate change are based on observations spanning several decades, centuries and millennium, from instrument records, ice cores, tree rings, lake and ocean sediment cores, and geologic records from all over the globe. No one single weather event or season or year is enough evidence to point either way. But having said that, I have at last seen something I never thought I would see in the middle of an ice sheet.

Temperatures have been so warm up at camp that it is actually possible to make snowballs. Usually the snow is too dry and cold to come even close to having something you can satisfactorily pelt at someone, and if you do want to throw something at someone, you have to get down to where the snow has compacted a bit and throw a big snow chunk. The stuff on the surface is usually fluffy or wind-packed and hard and dry. No snowballs. But up at NEEM the temperature got close to and above freezing for a bit, which is unheard of. It makes working and drilling out on the surface difficult…the snow tends to melt and refreeze when you don’t want it to. But it also meant we could have a snowball fight, and Aksel, the ace electrician up at camp from Denmark, started in immediately with building a rather ambitious snow man…

Askel and Adrian start out big with the bottom snowball of a snow ball.

…which turned into a snow penguin after the base snowball for the man proved to be just a little too big. (Sverrir, the Icelandic mechanic in camp, helped Aksel by pushing a load of snow using the machine used to groom the skiway).

Zoe and Kaitlin with the snow penguin.