Research

Coastal regions of Antarctica are very dynamic, and understanding their current and past behavior will help us anticipate future ice sheet change. Along the West Antarctic coastline, the Pacific Ocean-facing coast of Antarctica, large glaciers and ice shelves are thinning, retreating, losing mass, and contributing to sea-level rise. Coastal ice domes lining Antarctica have been quietly recording local climate for millennia, and we hope to learn what coastal West Antarctic ice rises can tell us about ongoing climate forcing and environmental change in that region. Using Operation IceBridge airborne radar data, ground based ice-penetrating radar, shallow ice cores, reanalysis data, and HYSPLIT back-trajectories we hope to better quantify the combined natural and anthropogenic climate forcing at play in coastal West Antarctica. 

After exploratory drilling in 2006, and an attempt to core to bedrock in 2010, our University of Minnesota and University of Washington (Eric Steig, Knut Christianson) teams were funded by the US National Science Foundation to return to Mt. Waddington (Combatant Col) to retrieve an ice core to bedrock, with additional support in Canada from Brian Menounos at the University of Northern British Columbia with funding from the Hakai Institute. After a Summer 2022 radar and surface snow-sampling survey, in Summer 2023 we recovered a 219-meter-long ice core, which we will sample and analyze to produce a record of hydroclimate for southwestern British Columbia, Canada hopefully spanning several hundred years. Follow along! 

COLDEX, an NSF Science and Technology Center, aims to explore Antarctica for the oldest possible ice core records of our planet’s climate and environmental history, and to help make polar science more inclusive and diverse. Minnesota NICE group leader Peter Neff is COLDEX Director for Field Research and Data and PhD student Demie Huffman is working as an integral part of the COLDEX Knowledge Transfer team led by University of Minnesota's Dr. Heidi Roop.