This summer, a four-person team lived on Denali for a month to drill ice samples for climate research. I spoke to graduate research assistant at the University of Maine Emma Erwin to hear more. 

A lot of my research is affiliated with ice core science and understanding this ice core science and understanding how the ice pack is changing and moving over time to impact potentially the stratigraphy of the ice core—the age-depth relationship of where is the oldest ice, and how is the time record or the layers… are they stacked up straight like a pancake or have they been deformed or slid out of the ice column, and how can this all better inform our climate record?

Stratigraphy is a branch of geology concerned with the study of rock layers and layering. Like tree rings, there’s a lot of important data to be gained from the layers of ice cores. They hold a record of what our planet used to be like. 

It provides a lot of really exciting opportunity to take information from what’s happening right now with climate change, and also work to extract information about what’s been happening on scales of tens of thousands of years and to try to use that information to put current climate change into better context so that we can understand and hopefully develop better predictions for what might happen in the future. 

The team this summer was extending data from two past ice cores drilled in Denali. They drilled a shallow ice core, just 20 meters, to collect data from 2017 to present. The original team in 2013, drilled an ice core that was over 200 meters, to collect data from thousands of years ago. 

This year’s team will analyze their ice for modern variables on climate, like wildfire signals, which get deposited in the snowpack. 

And then another really interesting component of it is looking at atmospheric aerosols and pollutants like lead that are often transported through high altitude climate systems. Like all the way from Asia, because of a lot of industrialization over there. And so, a particular interest in that during the time frame that we have this core covering because of COVID, and how the pandemic essentially shut down a lot of industrialization in the world. 

I asked Erwin what the ice core actually looks like. 

And so it’s a little over a meter long, is the length of the drill. It’s powered by solar panels and some batteries and drills down like around a meter. And then you pull out that meter of ice or snow and we call that meter-long segment a stick. And then you do that again and again and again until you’ve gone all the way again until you’ve gone down to until your depth objective, which in our case was 20 meters. 

Though the ice needs to be melted and analyzed, you can see changes in the ice with the naked eye, Erwin says. 

I guess the main thing, especially in a shallow ice core, is you see the density change. And you can  poke it with a gloved finger and see, okay this is porous snow, or it’s more fresh and deposited in the last couple years, and then it gets way more dense and much harder to the touch until it eventually becomes solid ice. 

Researchers put the cores in long plastic bags in an insulated box, which they kept buried in the snow. Erwin’s colleague from Dartmouth, Liam Fitzpatrick, has already started melting the ice cores and analyzing climate signals. Erwin focused on the geophysics side of the project—analyzing radar data and the compaction rate of the glacier and the glacier ice. 

And so that will help us interpret better the ice core that was drilled ten years ago, to understand what was going on 10,000 years ago.

Erwin explains that glacier research, specifically in Alaska, is important for two reasons: because the region is changing so rapidly, and because there’s not a lot of climate research from thousands of years ago.  

Erwin hopes that with more knowledge, there will be less climate change denialism. She explains that the way the natural world is changing, this data won’t be accessible forever. 

I think most of my drive in my climate science objectives specifically in Alaska are like trying to access the places that are still accessible that can help provide longer-term climate records while they’re still available. And so I think that is what kind of drives me with a sense of urgency. 

Being a life-long climber and outdoor enthusiast, ice compels Erwin. 

Because it’s such a beautiful and super strange and kind of like bizarre substance. Especially glacial ice that moves seemingly sometimes at its own will. 

The team hopes to have a publication drafted or ready to present in a scientific journal a year from now, Erwin says. They will present it at various conferences, send it to Denali National Park and circulate it around Talkeetna. For the next few months, Erwin and Fitzpatrick plan to head to Antarctica to do more ice core research. 

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