This award will use funds made available under the auspices of the Small Grants for Exploratory Research (SGER) program to deploy an experimental and mobile coring apparatus to obtain ice cores from an alpine site atop Mt. Waddington in the British Columbia Coast Range.
The site holds the promise, but not the certainty, of obtaining a continuous record of inter-annual variability in net annual snowfall over the last 200-1,000 years. This is important because if the drill works as planned, it will open up a new archive of paleoclimate data to use by climate researchers. At present, most paleoclimate research from ice cores is conducted from large base stations in polar regions.
Annual snow accumulation records, which can be well preserved even in areas with significant summer melt-layer formation, have been shown to be useful quantitative indicators of large-scale atmospheric circulation patterns. Snow accumulation records from the North Pacific region are of particular interest because of their potential to contribute to the documentation and reconstruction of multi-decadal climate variability. The ice divide at Combatant Col, below the summit of Mt. Waddington, contains approximately 150 meters of ice and rarely experiences melt at the surface.
The funds from this award will be leveraged against funds from the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences (CFCAS), who will bear the majority of the expedition costs (i.e., helicopter support, drill shipment, drill preparations and repair) and provide satellite imagery and analysis, installation of a weather station near Mt. Waddington, mesoscale climate modeling, and glacier ice flow modeling. The co-funding between the US NSF and the CFCAS is an attractive feature of this SGER request because it effectively leverages US funds to derive a bigger bang for the US buck.
Besides field testing a new strategy in ice core drilling that could have broad impact on the wider science community, the data from project will aid in the quantitative reconstruction of climate variability in western North America and the North Pacific as well as improved understanding of glacier mass balance and hydrological variability.
