Investigating the lakes, floods, and waterways beneath the West Antarctica Ice Sheet

Glaciologist and professor Slawek Tulaczyk and graduate student Nadine Quintana Krupinski of the University of California Santa Cruz work in the fast-evolving world of ice sheet dynamics. Understanding how large ice sheets in the Antarctic and Arctic behave in a warming world is an important but relatively unknown factor that may dramatically affect sea level and other consequences of climate change. Until recently, ice sheets and glaciers were thought of as vast reservoirs of frozen water, shrinking during warm seasons and growing during cold ones, and slowly moving toward the ocean and breaking off icebergs under the force of gravity.

Scientists are just starting to understand how dynamic these giant slabs of ice really are, moving up to 3 feet (1 m) a day, energized by a series of flooding and draining lakes and streams at their base. Slawek’s team spent four weeks in a remote camp on the vast West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) beginning in early November 2007. Every week they traveled by snowmobile to a new location where a lake exists under the ice sheet. They placed instruments, including GPS and seismometers, on the ice to record vertical and horizontal movements of the ice sheet, hoping to capture a flood under the ice. The team reported their weekly progress in blogs and photos beginning in November 2007 and were featured in a Webcast when they returned to McMurdo Station in mid-December 2007.