To understand vulnerable glaciers, climate scientists extract ice from continent’s remote and stormy coast
To understand the glaciers holding back meters of sea level rise, climate scientists swoop in to extract ice from Antarctica’s remote west coastThe helicopter hovered overhead, whipping up snow. Shielding his face, Peter Neff grabbed the dangling cargo load and guided it to the Antarctic ice. The helicopter sped back to the South Korean icebreakerat the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Time was ticking away on this day in January.
The collaboration is a multiyear, U.K.-U.S. operation to study the region and project the future of Thwaites and Pine Island. But it lacks critical data. With satellite records only going back to 1979, and no permanent weather stations in the region, Drilling close to Thwaites is easier said than done, however. The glaciers themselves aren’t good candidates—they move too quickly, disrupting the ice layers and scrambling the record. Canisteo, on the other hand, is a special coastal feature: an ice rise, where ice is stuck to the bedrock and builds up over millennia, quietly recording changes as the ice sheet flows around it.
Eight science days remained after the storm cleared and the team dug out. The kitchen tent was collapsed under snow, but there was no time to fix it. The researchers set up their drills and began to cut into the ice, sparing a few minutes to admire the view from the 600-meter-tall ice rise for the first time. “You can be standing on it and see the ocean,” Neff says. “That’s a wild thing for us as ice core scientists, because we’re used to being way inland and it’s just flat white.
The annual layers also include marine salts—sodium, chlorine, magnesium, and sulfur compounds thrown onto the ice by seasonal storms. That record of storms and wind, preserved in high resolution by the thick ice layers, should help Neff’s team identify when changes in regional winds started to drive melting at Thwaites, and potentially connect those changes to specific El Niño events or to human-caused warming.
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