Ice core drilling gets extreme in Greenland

August 27, 2009 · Posted in Environment · 1 Comment 
Terry Topping helps to catalog ice cores at the National Ice Core Lab at the Denver Federal Center in Lakewood in January 2003. Some of the ice cores from the recent drilling project in Greenland will be stored here. Photo by Sammy Dallal.

Terry Topping helps to catalog ice cores at the National Ice Core Lab at the Denver Federal Center in Lakewood in January 2003. Some of the ice cores from the recent drilling project in Greenland will be stored here. Photo by Sammy Dallal.

An international team of scientists — including researchers from the University of Colorado — broke a record this summer out on the frozen, unforgiving landscape in northern Greenland.

They drilled more than a mile deep into the ice sheet this year, breaking the single-season ice core-drilling record. (Seasons in the land of the midnight sun are short.) The scientists extracted 5,767 feet of fragile, layered ice columns that scientists can read like tree rings to determine what the climate was like on Earth thousands of years ago.

But even though they’ve drilled to record depths, scientists still need to make it through another 2,600 feet to reach bedrock and find the sweet stuff –  ice made from snow that fell more than 120,000 years in the Eemian Period when the Earth was much, much warmer.

For Jim White, a researcher at CU’s Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research, getting a good chunk of ice from the Eemian Period would be the end of a long, cold quest.

“We’ve been on a long quest to get the Eemian ice,” he said. “We had hints of it back in the ’60s, even, and in the ’70s. … I feel a lot like Captain Ahab. This is my Moby Dick.”

Read more about why scientists like White are interested in the Eemian Period at DailyCamera.com, check out the Web site for the project — called North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling — or watch a video about how scientists read the ice after the jump. Read more

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