Glaciers and Ice Sheets

Beyond EPICA: reached a depth of 808 meters in the Antarctic ice sheet

The second drilling campaign of Beyond EPICA - Oldest Ice has been successfully completed. The international research project is funded by the European Commission with 11 million euros and coordinated by the Institute of Polar Sciences of the CNR. It aims to obtain data on the evolution of temperatures, the composition of the atmosphere and the carbon cycle, by going back in time 1.5 million years through analyzing an ice core extracted from the depths of the Antarctic ice sheet. The complex deep ice drilling system was installed quickly, kicking off drilling operations and reaching a depth of 808.47 meters by the end of this 22/23

Global Warming Reaches Central Greenland

A temperature reconstruction from ice cores of the past 1,000 years reveals that today’s warming in central-north Greenland is surprisingly pronounced. The most recent decade surveyed in a study, the years 2001 to 2011, was the warmest in the past 1,000 years. The region is now 1.5 °C warmer than during the 20^th century, AWI scientists report in Nature.

Greenland Icesheet

Short-lived Ice Streams

Major ice streams can shut down, shifting rapid ice transport to other parts of the ice sheet, within a few thousand years. This was determined in reconstructions of two ice streams, based on ice-penetrating radar scans of the Greenland ice sheet, that a team of researchers led by the Alfred Wegener Institute have just presented in the journal Nature Geoscience.