You may have heard about the recent publication of Antarctic research from the Allan Hills, Antarctica, where a multi-institution research team from the National Science Foundation for Oldest Ice Exploration (NSF-COLDEX), discovered six million year old ice, the oldest dated ice on the planet. Peter Neff, PhD, is a co-author on that paper, Co-Director of Knowledge Transfer at COLDEX, and an assistant professor in the Department of Soil, Water, and Climate right here in CFANS. But the quest for the world’s oldest ice isn’t the only icy science Dr. Neff has been working on. At the Minnesota NICE (Neff Ice and Climate Exploration) Lab, Dr. Neff and his team also lead efforts looking to glaciers in West Antarctica and British Columbia to gain insights about Earth’s recent climate history captured in ice.
In contrast to the work in the Allan Hills, the team’s work on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) isn’t coring for the world’s oldest ice. Instead, the goal is to address gaps in climate data along the expansive WAIS coastline, which faces the Southern Pacific Ocean and where persistent glacier ice loss contributes to rising global sea levels. Thwaites Glacier, a key outlet glacier of the WAIS, is of particular concern. Historical data from ice cores in this region could be key to contextualizing the glacier’s modern behavior and making predictions for the future, but Thwaites’s location on the continent’s wet and rugged West Antarctic coastline makes getting the necessary equipment and personnel in position to drill ice cores extremely difficult (Although Minnesota NICE ice core expeditions to West Antarctica and British Columbia are geographically very different, they both involved helicopter-supported ice core camps of similar size.)
“We can study this region all we want in the present, but it’s very tricky to study the past behavior of Thwaites Glacier,” Dr. Neff explains. After spending a decade framing the value of work in this region, Neff and his collaborators managed to mount an expedition to a site near Thwaites, supported by the South Korean icebreaker RV ARAON and its helicopters. The 150 meter-deep ice cores collected on this January 2024 trip will likely allow for reconstruction of annual climate and environmental conditions going back to the year 1920. They are the first samples collected in an initiative called the “Ross-Amundsen Ice Core Array” (RAICA).
In British Columbia, Dr. Neff says, he and his team aren’t so much running full speed toward an urgent science question as they are digging deep into a unique location of preserved ice layers. This project is focused on the climatology of southwestern British Columbia at Mount Waddington, just 175 miles (280 kilometers) northwest of Vancouver, BC. Due to its 10,000 ft elevation and high annual snowfall, the site is cold enough to preserve interpretable annual snow layers.
“This site is much farther south than you would usually be able to drill for ice cores in North America,” Dr. Neff explains, making Mount Waddington an unusual source of paleoclimate data. The 219 meter-deep ice core recovered in summer 2023 at this location will likely establish a record of snow accumulation for the last 200-300 years, helping researchers understand how the Pacific Northwest hydroclimate has varied over that time period.
Dr. Neff’s ice core research is funded by the US National Science Foundation. The West Antarctic RAICA expedition was supported by the Korea Polar Research Institute.