News

UM expedition to head south for the winter

Team of scientists to explore western Antartica in December

By Meredith Holt

Posted on Nov. 11, 2002, at 12:00 a.m.

A research team, including a professor from the University of Maine, will make its way across the ice sheets of the West Antarctic to the South Pole Station, starting at the end of November.

The team, comprised of four graduate students and two professors, will gather data for an international project on global climate changes.

Two of the members left the United States on Nov. 4 and the others will follow shortly after. They are currently in New Zealand. The anticipated South Pole Station arrival date is Dec. 23.

According to the Secrets of the Ice Web site, fewer than 100,000 people have ever set foot on the icy continent of Antarctica and there are no permanent residents.

This expedition is the fourth in the International Trans Antarctic Scientific Expedition, funded by the National Science Foundation, according to a recent press release. Many other countries are involved in the project, including South Korea, Argentina and Sweden.

The leader of the expedition, Paul Mayewski, professor of global sciences and director of the UMaine Quaternary and Climate Studies, developed the idea for ITASE in 1990 and serves as chairman. Mayewski has participated in more than 35 expeditions to the Antarctic, the Arctic, the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau. ITASE is managed and coordinated through the ITASE Program Office at UMaine.

The graduate students in the Institute for Quaternary and Climate Studies are Susan Kaspari of Lakewood, Colo.; Dan Dixon of London, England; Blue Spikes of Garden City, Kan.; and Leigh Stearns of New York City.

The university has a long history of sending students and faculty on expeditions to Antarctica, Nick Houtman, senior news writer for Public Affairs, said.

The continent is covered almost completely by ice and snow. Few animals call Antarctica home. The research team will share the territory with fish, krill, whales, penguins and seals.

Although Orono is entering into another Maine winter, Antarctic is currently in its summer. Even so, the team may face extreme cold. According to the Secrets of the Ice Web site, the average annual temperature at South Pole Station is a bitter -56 degrees Fahrenheit. The station is about 1,000 feet from the actual South Pole, but it is drifting toward it at a rate of 33 feet per year.

“[Antarctica] is the coldest, highest and driest,” Houtman said. “It’s all kinds of extremes, which is part of the reason it’s so interesting for scientists. Because it’s a place of such extremes, it exerts a lot of control over the way the earth works.”

The expedition team will dig ice cores throughout their journey. Ice cores are about three inches in diameter and reveal information about air temperature, precipitation rate and solar radiation. Team members must drill to depths of 160 to 230 feet into the ice to reach the 200-year mark. This takes about a day to accomplish, according to the Secrets of the Ice Web site.

The ice cores will be divided and sent to different countries for analysis. Some will be brought back to the United States, and some will be stored in the freezer next to the Sawyer Research Center on campus. The temperature in the freezer is -300 degrees Celsius, according to Houtman.

When the samples arrive in the states, scientists will perform chemical analyses on the fine layers of ice, each corresponding to one year in time. Although analysts can look back thousands of years, the ITASE project focuses on the past 200 years. Major climate changes occur each decade, so this project will reveal much about Earth’s climate and its changes. Evidence of El Ni�o, volcano eruptions and pollution have been found in Antarctic snow and ice samples.

“If I had to put my research in one word, it would be ‘time,’” Mayewski said in an article written by Houtman. “We’re stepping back in time in many ways. Our world changes second by second over time, and you have to envision all of these different pictures. The question is, how do you put them together in any reasonable sequence?”

The team will dig deep snow pits to examine the snow near the surface of the ice core sites. They will also anchor devices in the ice that track the elevation of the ice over time. These sites are referred to as “coffee can sites” because actual coffee cans were used some time ago, according to Houtman. It is the job of Stearns to fly to these sites to check the equipment and elevation levels.

Elevation levels are important to the project because one of the big scientific questions is what would happen if the ice sheet continues to rise as it has in recent years, Houtman said.

At the end of the expedition, the team members will be picked up by plane and brought back to McMurdo Base in West Antarctica.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 11th, 2002, 12:00 am. You can follow any responses to this article through the RSS feed.