Ice Coring in Alaska
30.04.2008 - Other
A new multi-year ice coring mission is being carried out in Alaska's Denali National Park, bringing together the University of New Hampshire and University of Maine. This year's month-long reconnaissance mission will aim to identify the best possible drill sites to recover ice cores from the park's glaciers.
It is believed these surface-to-bedrock ice cores should allow scientists to read climate records going back 2,000 years and could provide a good frame for determining:
- how climate change has been affected by volcanic activity
- the variability of solar energy
- changes in greenhouse gas concentrations
- dust and aerosol concentration in the atmosphere (which determine the amount of sunlight Earth gets)
During this reconnaissance stage, scientists will also collect samples for chemical analysis in order to decipher changes in temperature, atmospheric circulation and such environmental changes as "Arctic haze", a phenomenon which draws heavily polluted air masses from North America, Europe and Asia to the Arctic.
This research project should allow better understanding on how the Pacific Northwest fits into the climate change process. It should also help clarify whether the long believed adage that change first occurred in the North Atlantic before it contaminated the North Pacific is true or not.
