A
team of UK and U.S. polar scientists are about to embark on one of the largest
joint Antarctic missions for more than 70 years.
Today
marks the start of the first field season of a five-year quest to understand
the contribution that the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica will make to
global sea level. Currently, the amount of ice draining into the sea from this
West Antarctic Ice Sheet glacier accounts for around four per cent of global
sea-level rise. Scientists are concerned that a collapse of the Thwaites
Glacier could significantly raise global sea levels.
Support
teams will now begin their work to get field camps and supply depots set up and
ready for the arrival of science teams, which will include researchers from
Northumbria University, Newcastle. They
will cover about 7,000 km in extremely cold and hostile conditions as the Thwaites
Glacier is extremely remote and difficult to reach. Getting science and support
teams to where they need to be is a massive joint operation involving tractor
traverses, aircraft operations and ship-borne support.
The
£20 million (approx. $25 million) research collaboration, funded by the UK
Natural Environment Research Council and the US National Science Foundation,
involves over 100 scientists and support staff working on eight different
projects to understand how the Glacier is behaving and to establish whether it
is likely to begin to collapse within the next few decades or within centuries.
Northumbria University is involved in two of these eight projects. Hilmar Gudmundsson, a
Professor of Glaciology and Extreme Environments is leading a £648,000 project
called PROPHET in which he will use new techniques to model the history and
evolution of the glacier and its ice flow to understand how it has behaved in
the past. This will help the team to make predictions on how it will evolve in
future.
In
the second project, Professor John Woodward, Faculty Pro-Vice-Chancellor for
Engineering and Environment will spend three months in Antarctica in 2020 to find the best sites to drill into the ice to look for evidence of the ice
sheet collapsing in the past. If it has collapsed, the project team will be
able to assess how it recovered and how it is currently responding to
environmental conditions.
Professor Gudmundsson said: “Antarctica is currently losing mass
at an increasing rate, and through its impact on global sea level the ice sheet
is already affecting our lives. What happens in Antarctica does not stay in
Antarctica!
“New data and numerical modelling done as part of this project
promises to provide a much improved understanding of why this area is changing
so quickly. And importantly, we will be able to provide better estimates of the
likely future contribution of this region to global sea level rise.”
Professor
David Vaughan, Director of Science at British Antarctic Survey is the UK’s lead
scientific coordinator. He said: “This
is a tremendously exciting mission, and a fantastic example of how two nations
can combine their scientific and operational expertise to tackle one of the big
questions facing society today and in the future.
“I’ve
been working in Antarctica for over 30 years and for much of that time we’ve
known that Thwaites Glacier holds the key to a much better understanding of
sea-level rise. This is our first chance to get a deeper understanding of this
‘wild card’ in West Antarctica.
“I
believe that this joint effort will make a real difference to our ability to
provide governments with the right information for policy and business actions
that will help protect coastal cities, ecosystems and vulnerable communities in
the future.”
Lead
U.S. scientific coordinator, Dr. Ted Scambos, of University of Colorado Boulder, added: “Thwaites
is this massive glacier — so large that even from a plane you can’t see across
it — and everything about it is telling us that it is unstable. Its speed has
increased, its surface has dropped, the front of it has retreated inland; and
it is resting on ground that used to be deep seabed.
“We’ve
learned a lot of this from satellites and aircraft, but to go further in
understanding how this glacier will evolve in the coming decades, we need to go
there. This is the first year of an effort that will return several times in
the next few years, bringing instruments we can place on the snow, in the ice,
on the land and in the ocean, so that models that forecast ice changes and sea
level rise will produce a better picture of the future.”
The
five-year programme begins in November 2018 and continues to 2023. During the coming Antarctic field season a
suite of scientific investigations will take place at sea, in the air and on
the ice.
Northumbria University to investigate how and when the Antarctic's Thwaites Glacier might collapse from Northumbria University on Vimeo.
What is involved in the first phase of
this research project?
- In early 2019, four large tracked vehicles, 14 snow mobiles, many sledges, two living cabooses, fuel and nearly 5,000 days of food will be off-loaded at the ice edge by the British Antarctic Survey’s logistics ship RRS Ernest Shackleton with support from the Royal Navy polar patrol ship HMS Protector. A team of field support staff will then establish a depot before traversing south to set up two additional camps.
- Over 20 researchers will set sail in late January on the US icebreaker Nathaniel B Palmer. Research teams on board will map the seafloor – using swath bathymetry – around the ice front of Thwaites Glacier to see how the shape of the bed affected the glacier’s behaviour in the past. They will collect sediment cores from the seabed, which will reveal the extent to which past glacier retreat has been driven by interactions with the ocean and will deploy ocean gliders and autonomous vehicles to collect data to discover how the glacier interacts with the ocean today. Tagged Weddell and Elephant seals that haul out on nearby islands will capture data about their behaviour and the ocean conditions where they dive.
- Science teams will collect samples of rock, penguin bones, algae and shells from nearby islands to carbon date them so they can determine how sea level has changed in the past 5000 years. All this information will improve reliability of the ice sheet models that are used to predict future sea level change.
- Scientists will travel through the US McMurdo research station to identify field sites for hot water drilling, radar and seismic investigations for future field seasons.
- In addition, British Antarctic Survey will fly its Twin Otter aircraft, equipped with air-borne radar, to collect data on the ice thickness and for estimating the sea-bed depth. A team will fly in lines across the glacier to identify the best sites for future on-ice field work.
- Throughout the November to February field season, ski-equipped LC-130 Hercules aircraft, flown for NSF by the 109th Airlift Wing of the New York Air National Guard, will deliver fuel from NSF’s McMurdo Station deep into West Antarctica and establish camps in preparation for next season's major land-based work.
