Daring ‘James Bond’ mission to drill Antarctic ice cores could reveal future of sea level rise

The helicopter hovered overhead, whipping up snow. Shielding his face, Peter Neff grabbed the dangling cargo load and guided it to the Antarctic ice. The helicopter sped back to the South Korean icebreaker RV Araon , 20 kilometers away, to fetch more gear. One trip down, 17 more to go, thought Neff, a polar glaciologist at the University of Minnesota (UM) Twin Cities. Time was ticking away on this day in January. In the best-case scenario, Neff and his team would have just 10 days to drill ice cores on Canisteo, a peninsula on the west coast of Antarctica—and a blizzard was already looming. Everything about Neff’s plan was unconventional. Scientists usually target sites deep in the continent’s interior, where the weather is calmer and they can spend years collecting kilometers-long ice cores that record hundreds of thousands of years of climate history. Neff needed just a couple hundred years of history, and he only needed to drill 150 meters deep to get it. But his chosen location was exceptionally remote and stormy. He was there because of what lay some 130 kilometers away, across a bay from Canisteo: the gargantuan rivers of ice known as the Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers , which jut into the Amundsen Sea as frozen shelves tens of kilometers wide. These glaciers act as corks in the bottle of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which spans a large swath of the continent and stores enough water to raise sea level by 3 to...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news