Last summer, several IGERT fellows had the serendipitous and rare opportunity to witness a warming climate’s effect on Greenland first-hand. Julia Bradley-Cook was stationed in Kangerlussuaq collecting data on carbon cycling in soil when the bridge over the Watson river collapsed from anomalously high flows of meltwater (see http://dartmouthigert.wordpress.com/2012/07/11/glacial-melt-threatens-town-water-supply and http://dartmouthigert.wordpress.com/2012/07/11/update-the-river-powers-on). Days later, the 3rd cohort of Dartmouth IGERT students flew up to Summit Camp, Greenland’s highest point, and observed features of the ice sheet-wide surface melt. Fellow Kaitlin Keegan, Thayer Professor Mary Albert, and their collaborators study the frequency of such melt events; their work at the North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling (NEEM) sight has suggested that such an event last transpired in 1889 and, therefore, is unprecedented in the satellite record. (See http://dartmouthigert.wordpress.com/2012/07/21/new-summit-melt-layer).
A new Nature publication on Greenland climate authored by the NEEM community, which includes Albert and Keegan, prompted an entry on the scientific blog site RealClimate.org. RealClimate was started and is maintained by “working climate scientists” who “aim to provide a quick response to developing stories and provide the context sometimes missing in mainstream commentary.” Check out the discussion on Greenland’s 2012 summer conditions, how they compare to those 125,000 years ago, and what we can learn about past temperatures and sea level rise from an ice core! I was particularly excited about the conclusion of the entry since author Dr. Steig mentioned the significance of a new ice core from West Antarctica. I just returned from a field season on Roosevelt Island assisting with the drilling of this core, which will help scientists understand the sensitivity of the Ross Ice Shelf and, thus, of the West Antarctic ice sheet to changes in climate. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/01/the-greenland-melt/
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Alexandra Giese
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Lee McDavid
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Thomas Overly
A little history: In the summer of 1957 I carried out a small hand coring study at Site 2 about 200 miles` east of Thule AFB. I was working for SIPRE, an Army lab. The purpose of the study was to get a temperature profile of the upper ice cap. I think it went back 50-100 years. It was expected that after the annual variations smoothed out the temperature would increase with depth due to heat from the inner Earth. Instead it got steadily colder, much to everybody’s surprise. Climate studies have noticed that the climate has warmed since the 19th C but not necessarily from the usually cited reasons which were presumably not operative in those times.
Best, Tim Fohl