CONTACT: Jack Dibb
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WRITER:Suki Casanave
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University of New Hampshire scientist leads first-ever winter research expedition at the top of the world
DURHAM, NH -- Camping out all winter on an ice sheet may not be high on your travel wish list. But for a handful of researchers and their colleagues, spending the winter on top of the Greenland ice sheet, one of the coldest places on earth, is a dream come true.
"This project is the next step in an ongoing international effort to better understand atmospheric composition," says University of New Hampshire geochemist and project director Jack Dibb. Researchers hope findings will provide clues that help interpret climate history and how human beings affect the climate.
Until now, winter at Summit, Greenland, has been like the dark side of the moon for scientists. The 20 or so research station residents have always flown south for the winter, returning in spring to dig the structures out of the snow. "This year we're not turning off the lights and locking the door when we fly out in August," says Dibb, who will direct the program from his New Hampshire office. "We're leaving four people up there."
This year's wintering crew--an electronics technician, a mechanic, and two science technicians associated with a variety of universities--will spend most of their Summit sojourn in "The Greenhouse," a one-story, 32-by-36 foot building that is combination bunkroom, living room, and laboratory. They will make regular forays into the dark and cold gathering snow and making atmospheric chemistry and meteorological measurements.
"We've been looking for some time at how the composition of the snow reflects the composition of the atmosphere," says Dibb, who will be in frequent touch with the researchers at the pole, "but until now we've been missing data for half the year."
Funded by the National Science Foundation, the Greenland winter-over project is being conducted atop a dazzling expanse of ice nearly two miles thick. This outdoor laboratory, where the temperature can drop to a chilly -85 degrees Farenheit, is the only ice sheet remaining from the vast continental glaciers that covered much of North America and Asia during the last glacial period.
"The falling snow, which eventually becomes compacted into ice, stores information about the atmosphere at the time it fell--the water vapor, temperature, and dust content," explains Dibb."But we need to know what actually gets incorporated into the snow and then into the ice." Volcanic eruptions, forest fires, ocean storms, atomic bombs, and pollution--all have left chemical or physical clues in the atmosphere that show up in the ice sheet's annual layers. Climatologists examine these layers for clues, counting backwards into the past, in search of answers to still-undefined mysteries.
From 1989-1993 NSF drilled the Northern Hemisphere's longest ice core at Summit in a venture called the Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2, directed by another UNH professor, Paul Mayewski. "The Greenland ice cores have already shown us that there were unexpectedly rapid and dramatic shifts in climate," says Dibb. "Now we want to know how closely these changes in ice composition actually record the changing chemistry of the atmosphere. The idea is to turn these ice core records into a history of the atmosphere's composition."
Next April the sleuthing begins back in New Hampshire, when 2,000 cup-sized containers of Greenland snow will be flown back, melted and analyzed at the UNH labs. "This will be exciting," says Sallie Whitlow, supervisor of the lab for the Climate Change Research Center's chemistry laboratory, "because no one has ever had this information before."
Meanwhile, at Summit, the sun will set in mid-November and not reappear until late January. Already the research station is being pummeled by storms, the sort of weather that has hampered attempts at winter research with automated instruments in the past. This year, the station's crew will be on hand if something goes awry.
If the winter experiment goes well, NSF will explore setting up year-round quarters at Summit. For now, the intrepid team--far from the calls of telemarketers and rush-hour traffic--will be reading, baking, watching the shimmering curtain of the Northern Lights, and meticulously taking samples of snow and air through the long Greenland night.
Check the web for more about UNH'sClimate Change Research Center.
PHOTO CAPTION OUT IN THE COLD: Waist-high in a Greenland snow pit, Jack Dibb a University of New Hampshire geochemist in the College of Engineering and Physical Sciences spends a summer day taking snow samples. This year, for the first time, researchers will extract snow during the winter. Like the samples taken during summer expeditions, these little chunks of snow will be flown back to UNH laboratories and used to document seasonal changes in snow composition--and how these changes relate to air chemistry and circulation patterns. (Courtesy photo)