The RICE project which is called the Roosevelt Island Climate Evolution project,
or it's acronym, RICE is a climate study.
What we're doing is we're using a record of the past by analyzing ice
to better understand the climate behavior
under changing conditions that we expect in the future.
One of the big concerns that we have is the stability of West Antarctica.
West Antarctica holds the equivalent of about
six to seven metres of sea level rise,
and should West Antarctic collapse,
we would see over a certain time period, that water contributing
contributing to the global oceans and sea level rise.
What the RICE project is trying to achieve
is determining how quickly this could happen
and how quickly and how much water could be contributed to global sea level.
The Ross Ice Shelf is the largest ice shelf in the world.
It is the size of France
and it sits just adjacent to West Antarctica
because it's fed by West Antarctica.
A large proportion of West Antarctica
drains into the Ross Ice Shelf
and from there into the ocean.
Roosevelt Island is covered by ice.
its accumulated locally there.
The Ross Ice Shelf flows around it,
but it's completely covered under sow and ice.
It's quite a large island, it's about 150 km long,
and it's about 60 kilometers wide.
You just see it as an ever so gentle white hump in the middle of nowhere.
As you land you suddenly feel rather small
because it is just white all around you.
White to the the horizon. White and flat.
One of the aspects that makes Roosevelt Island such a good place to study ice cores
is that there's a lot of snowfall.
The weather at Roosevelt Island can be quite changeable.
You can have one moment, a beautiful sunny day
and all you see is white horizon with a blue blue sky over you
and within hours, even minutes, you can find yourself in thick fog
when you can only find the next tent by following a flagline
that we put between all the tents.
We have about 30 tonnes of equipment that we bring to Roosevelt Island.
Many flights are necessary for this.
The planes have skis to land on, and they land on a skiway.
Once they land, each plane is met by a crew,
and the crew will have to offload the plane.
We use sledges and Ski-Doos to move the equipment around.
Everything is lined out, flags are put into place.
We create long rows of equipment so that
we can find it up a big snow snow storm
food and fuel and other things to support us
for our four months stay there.
To be able to continue to drill throughout storms
and other weather conditions,
we have a drill tent that was specifically designed
by Alex and Darcy our two engineers.
The drill tent is 27 metres long
and it is our home for the entire time period of the drilling operations.
The drill itself is only about two metres high,
and to accommodate the drill activity underneath it,
we have to cut a four metre deep trench underneath the tent.
We're using chainsaws to outline the area of the drill trench,
and then cut four metres down.
Then the drill is set up. The core processing accessories are set up.
And then directly in the place where we are drilling
we also need to cut a further five metres into the ice,
so a total of nine meters where the drill mast
will swing up and down during the drill operation.
Our drill was built by Darcy and Alex.
It is based on a long proven Danish design
that was given to us by our Danish colleagues,
and then they made some modifications to adjust it
for the particular conditions that we expected at Roosevelt Island.
The particular achievement of this drilling system
is that we got extremely good core quality
throughout the entire drilling process.
The drill is an electro-mechanical drill,
and what that means really is it has three knives at a round disc
that are spinning around.
It is a little bit like a hand roll when you drill a hole into the wall,
but instead of just making a hole,
our drill cuts ring and leaves the piece in the middle,
the core, intact.
Each time we send the drill down,
the drill goes down on a wire and cuts another two metres into the ice,
and leaves the middle, the core, intact.
We then break the core
and bring the core upon a winch, all the way to the surface again.
When the drill comes to the surface,
the mast goes from vertical to lie horizontally.
Then we can extract the inner barrel that contains the core,
and then the core is pushed out onto the processing table.
When it is on the table,
the drillers hand over the core to the core processing team.
The core processing team fits the core that has just been brought up
to the previous piece, and they normally fit perfectly together.
They then cut them into one metre length pieces.
these one metre length pieces are then packed into
into ice core boxes.
These need to be kept at or below -18 degrees
during the entire time period.
during the summer we often experience temperatures
that can be as warm as -5 or warmer even for some hours during the day.
So we have the storage cave which is located four metres below the surface
where we store all the cores.
The drilling occurred over two field seasons in Antarctica.
Both of these fields seasons took four months.
During the second field season we drilled from 130 metre depth
to the bottom, which was at 764 metres,
drilling 20 hours a day.
It's very important that the cores stay below -18 degrees temperature
to maintain the integrity of the records
that we are hoping to get from the ice.
And so the ice needs to be kept cold onsite,
but then also during transport.
And then even once they're in the plane,
the plane switches of all heating and flies higher than usual.
It flies at 10,000 feet
to allow for colder temperatures inside the plane.
The ice is then stored at Scott Base until the ship arrives
and starts its journey back to New Zealand.
Here we at the New Zealand national ice core research facility at GNS science.
The ice has arrived and our international collaborators are here with us
to process and analyze the core.
Each metre is taken from the storage freezer into our work freezer.
Here we cut the core using a horizontal saw,
this provides a good surface that is cleaned
to measure the electric conductivity.
This is a first glimpse of the age of the ice.
It provides a signal of volcanic eruptions and large climatic transitions.
We then cut pieces for various analysis.
One of these pieces is now being transferred
into the ultra clean lamp here.
We take each metre of core and we place it on the continuous melter.
This continuous melter is an ultra clean surface.
It is a copper melter which is gold coated,
and as the ice melts through the melter,
we're dividing the material
into ice that came from the interior of the core,
and thus has never been touched or handled in any way, it's completely pristine,
and the outer section that has experienced the cut and the band saws
and has been handled by people.
From this clean inner part of the core,
we can measure a variety of analyses.
The analyses can be distinguished into three groups.
We measure the gases, we measure the water, and we measure the particulars in the ice.
Here you see the water coming off the melter
which is being pumped through these tubes
to one of the critical points in the melter system,
and it's called the debubbler.
you see this triangle, the water and the bubbles that are coming from the ice
are being pumped into this triangle.
the bubbles over to the to the gas analyzer,
a laser that measures methane concentrations real time.
While the water follows gravity and flows downwards
and is being pumped into many lines.
One of the lines carries on to vials,
while the other lines go to seven other instruments
analyze this water directly for the
content of black carbon, dust, conductivity, PH, water isotopes and calcium.
By the end of the processing process we will have filled over a hundred thousand vials.
Each will be analyzed and will contribute to our understanding
of the climate behavior in the past.
Each of these drops of water is so precious to us
because it contributes vital information
on how Antarctica will respond to a warming world.
This is important because Antarctica's response
has the potential to fundamentally alter global sea levels,
which matters to everybody.