We know that with climate change the
Arctic is warming about twice as fast as
the rest of the world and our big
concern is sea level rise. How fast is
Greenland melting and therefore how fast are
the oceans rising.
Our project was focused on the last 40 to 50 years
where human-caused climate change has really
accelerated the rapid melting of the
snow at the surface.
We're going to Greenland to try and
understand how fast is Greenland melting
today. If we can understand how fast is
melting today and the processes that are
causing it to melt today we can improve
our models of how Greenland is going to
melt in the future. Anytime we're looking
to the future we have to be using our
computer models and I know computer models
get a lot of sort of bad flak from the
public. People don't trust models. You can
make models do anything but we don't. We
don't want the model to do anything. We
want the models to predict what is
likely to happen in the future. What
we're trying to do is make those models
as good as possible by showing that the
models work and if they can reproduce
what's happening today we have a lot
more confidence that they're going to do
a good job predicting the future. So what
we wanted to do was actually physically
go to Greenland, boots-on-the-ground, make
these measurements that you can only
make by being there.
We were snowmobiling
from the southwest part of Greenland a
place called The Raven camp all the way
up to the top of Greenland, the very
top of the dome of the ice sheet at a
place called summit and I was a total of
around 1,200 kilometers that we had to snowmobile.
We spend an enormous amount
of time planning our logistics, training,
making sure that our students have the
mountaineering training, the wilderness
first responder training, any other sort
of scientific training that they need so
that when we're in the field we stack
the deck in our favor for being
successful scientifically and for being
completely safe.
At first I would say our whole team was
pretty nervous about going out there
when the plane drops you off your miles
from the closest person, closest hospital
the closest computer, There's no internet
or cell phone service out there.
Retrieving an ice core from Greenland
and bringing it back to Dartmouth College
in New Hampshire is actually
quite an extensive process. You have to
go you have to dig a pit about five feet
deep and big enough to work inside this
pit and this keeps you out of the wind
and it also lets you get down to a layer
that's a little bit harder in order to
stand on and work from
We start by hand turning the drill as we get the first
meter to two meters of snow. After we
send the barrel down into the hole we
pull it back up with the ice core inside
of it. We take off the top of it and
shove the ice core out into a clean bin
that holds the ice core.
Once we have the ice core on the surface we can weigh it,
we can measure it, we can take
photographs of the ice core both with
regular cameras and near infrared
cameras and then we write down exactly
where this ice core is from and we put it
in a big plastic bag that we label since
all the ice cores and all the snow look
the same and we put it inside of a big
box that will later ship back to New Hampshire
My name is Karina Graeter. I'm from
Cincinnati, Ohio and I'm a second year
masters student here at Dartmouth, studying earth sciences.
Karina's focus more on the melt
side of things and what she's going to
do is look at these melt layers that we
see in the core. Analyzing these cores
I spend about four to five hours a day in
zero degree Fahrenheit freezer.
I get out a core and I cut it in half and what I
do is store half the core from melting
and then the other half i analyze it for
the distribution of melt layers in the firm.
Ice cores allow us to see
annual layers in the snow
just like the rings on a tree and so we
can look at the thickness of those
layers and figure out how much snow fell
in each year going back in time.
This ice is incredibly clean. This is
some of the cleanest water on the planet
and what we're trying to measure are the
things that is not clean about it we're
trying to measure the dust in it.
The salt that comes in blowing from the
ocean. Any pollution that that falls in
it. I'm primarily a snow chemist so I
study climate change but the way that I
study climate change is often using the
chemistry in the ice cores.
It's very small likelihood that anyone will ever
go back to Greenland and get cores in
these locations again that cover these
years of accumulation and so we want to
save these for future scientific
purposes. It was really great group of
people coming together each with their
own skill sets. Each with their own
science priorities and a mix of those
personalities and those skillsets
allowed our project to be really
successful. The whole effort is to try
and make our predictions of future
climate change and future sea-level rise
better so that we can prepare as a
society.