News from Antarctica

PhD student at Centre for Ice and Climate Inger Seierstad participates in the US West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide (WAIS Divide) ice core drilling project. The WAIS sheet meets the ocean in huge ice shelves that are sensitive to changes in sea temperatures and sea level. A new paper in the prestigious journal Nature is indeed documenting that the WAIS is loosing more than a billion tons of ice each year, emphasising the need to get a better hold of the past evolution of the West Antarctic climate.

Inger Seierstad has experience from ice core drilling projects in Greenland led by Centre for Ice and Climate and has mainly worked at WAIS Divide with ice core processing. After about 2 months in the camp at 79.5°S, the team is now closing down the camp and preparing for the trip home. The trip goes via the McMurdo base at the coast and Australia, and can take anything from a few days to several weeks depending on the weather conditions. From the camp, Inger describes the status:
"We have had quite high winds and snowfall the last days. Right now, it's 25 knots with 400 meter visibility. The weather around camp hasn't been good for some time, so all flights have been cancelled for the last 12 days. That means that we have many people in camp waiting to get out and also people waiting in McMurdo to get in. But maybe more frustrating … we are running out of sugar, flour and butter! We are not exactly suffering, though, we have loads of food, it just takes slightly more creativity from the cooks. "

Read more about
The WAIS Divide project
The WAIS Divide field blog
The Nature paper about WAIS (E. Rignot et al., Recent Antarctic ice mass loss from radar interferometry and regional climate modelling, Nature 13 January, doi:10.1038/ngeo102)