Editor's Note: Today we're very pleased to begin our 'Letters from Antarctica' series. Our correspondent-on-the-ice, Patricia Ballou, currently lives and works in one of the most inhospitable places on the planet, and is generously using her spare hours to talk to scientists and researchers so the world can gain insights into their work. Patricia's first interview is a very interesting introduction to the work of the ANDRILL program. I'll leave Patricia to tell you more about this, but please join me in welcoming Patricia to the team, and be sure to watch for her subsequent posts from the bottom of the world!
 Patricia Ballou |
Antarctica is like the final frontier of our planet. At the bottom of the world and isolated from the bustle of everyday life, it is the extreme of earth’s climates with no easy escape once you have entered its world. I came here because I like adventures. I would have come here as a volunteer if that would have afforded me an opportunity to see this place but I was fortunate enough to find employment. I am an adventurer and have taken great risks to travel and see the peoples and cultures of varying countries. I lived in Japan for three years, deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan, Korea and Kosovo. I have traveled many places in between assignments and guess this is the path I feel most comfortable with. Some places have been hospitable, while others were war torn but in the end the wealth of knowledge I came away with was worth the trip. While there isn’t a particular Antarctic culture, there is a variety of wildlife that can only be experienced by coming here not to mention the spectacular landscape.
I am located at McMurdo Station, which is an island on the edge of the Ross Sea. It is a famous location because the explorers Scott and Shackleton came this way when making attempts to the South Pole. My background is in meteorology. I was a combat weather forecaster for the military for years and am now applying those weather skills here. I’m not sure if application is the best way to put it. The temperatures, systems and topography are unlike anything I have ever seen. So, I rely on lots of training by others who have been coming down here year after year. Weather patterns aren’t necessarily patterns but a mixture of cold dense air oozing around mountainous terrain like cold thick syrup and then hitting the ice sheets and gaining accelerated speed before slamming into McMurdo. They come with swiftness and violence that takes forecasters by surprise and conditions can deteriorate in minutes. With over 800 personnel on station and many of them doing treacherous jobs on the ice shelf, it is the task of the weather department to ensure the safety of personnel and aircraft. My affiliation to Celsias is coincidental and not planned. My willingness to seek out the many scientists who come for the summer to work on unique projects and ask them to contribute to the global discussion on climate change is another part of the adventure. One not planned but could benefit both myself and those who read their viewpoints. There is an agenda to their willingness to sit down with me and candidly speak about climate change. Most research done on this continent is being used to try to get a better picture of our planet’s climatic future. There has been much press given to the overall predictions and possible scenarios if we continue on our current path but my goal is to narrow it down even further. Antarctic scientists are using these interviews to educate the public and let their individual voices be heard concerning very sensitive topics. They are fully aware that their research might be the only link we have to knowing how our planet will react if, as a global society, we do nothing to change our course and continue to ignore the realities of accelerated climate change.
Interview with Dr. David Harwood, Principal Investigator for the ANDRILL Program: “Drilling Back to the Future”
 Dr. David Harwood |
The ANtarctic DRILLing (ANDRILL) Program refers to one of the largest international projects undertaken to recover stratigraphic records from underneath hundreds of meters of ice, sea and soil in Antarctica. There are many unanswered questions concerning the planet’s future as temperatures continue to rise and carbon dioxide measurements reach unimaginable levels at an accelerated pace. What can the past reveal about our uncertain future? So far, drill cores raised from depths of over 1,000 meters date back to over 14 million years and show over 60 periods of glacial (cool) and interglacial (warm) cycles in the earth’s climate history. With over 80% of the world’s fresh water held in the frozen grasps of the harshest continent on earth what would happen if a warmer planet quickened a 20,000 year process to a mere 100 years or less? How are all species, to include humans, going to adapt to these climatic changes if this rapid pace continues? In the first of these Interviews I spoke with Dr. David Harwood, ANDRILL Principle Investigator, geologist/paleontologist and Professor and Stout Chair at the University of Nebraska. David has been heading the project to discover the secrets of our planet’s climatic past. His team consists of scientists, students and educators from the United States, New Zealand, Great Britain, Germany and Italy. It is an international collaboration with a price tag of over $30 million making this the largest investment for the National Science Foundation, and its international partners. Funds are gathered from participating countries and the University of Nebraska Science Management Office in conjunction with the Operations Management Office, Antarctica, New Zealand and administer the budget with $10 million going to operations and another $20 million funding the science and research. It is at the top of the projects list for the International Polar Year Committee (IPY).
Patricia Ballou: What is your background when it comes to Antarctic research and how long have you been interested in the glacial exploration?
Dr. David Harwood: I’m on my sixteenth season as an Antarctic scientist and have been a researcher since the infancy of drilling exploration on the southernmost continent. The first project was the Dry Valley Drilling project in the mid to early 70s. As the drilling rig was moved across the ice shelf we decided to drill through the ice and that set the precedence for using a floating rig and the ice acted as an anchor. This is important because we are recovering for the first time actual climatological records from underneath the ice instead of guessing the history of glacial progression and regression.
PB: There are many ways to apply a geologist background in the field of stratographic records. Why Antarctica?
DH: When I got my PhD back in the 1980s my dissertation was on this question we are faced with today. When did Antarctica go into a freeze as it is now and what has been the history of the ice sheet? My birth as a scientist was really started here. When I came on board, the accepted view was that the ice sheets formed once, stayed and have never changed. My research has discredited that dogma and now we know that the ice sheets are dynamic and come and go as climate cycles take place. 
PB: Seeing that climate change is now a common term and is the discussion of choice in the media, has this changed your focus and how has your team used this to their advantage?
DH: It makes our research all the more pertinent. It drives the process a bit more but in addition to the research about climate and paleo-climate issues we are able to advance the tools used to extract and record our findings and date the cores. We also have a responsibility to take our research out to the public. So it becomes more relevant because there is a question out there that humanity has to face. This is also a time to teach children about the possibilities without being afraid to face issues and choices. We can use media, research and education to empower children and let them know they can be part of the solution.
PB: You have the backing of the global science community but who proposed ANDRILL and how did the international community respond to the idea?
DH: It was proposed as a collaborative effort with the University of Nebraska taking the lead. It has been recognized that the only way to get the Cenozoic Era records for Antarctica is to be physically here and working to retrieve drill cores. ANDRILL has been built off the success of previous drilling projects: Cape Roberts Project and the Ross Sea Project. Through improved technologies and questions ANDRILL is the result of international cooperation and funding. We have retrieved over a 1000 meters of core with 98% recovery rate so our process has proven effective. We are looking to the future and our big lofty science goals builds upon the ANDRILL technologies and develops science portfolios for different parts of Antarctica.
PB: The earth is dated at over 4.5 billion years old. That is a lot of territory to cover and explore climate change. You have focused on the most recent era: The Cenozoic (65 million to present). Why the “Age of Mammals” and how is it similar to our current climate?
DH: As we drill down deeper we are stepping into times we haven’t seen for millions and millions of years. So let’s go back to just a mere 3-4 million year old Antarctica. There is vegetation and coastline instead of the thick ice sheets and frozen inlets and coastal waterways of today. Antarctica’s temperatures were much warmer than our present temperatures in the warm belt of the earth. The volcanoes didn’t exist and fjords and wetlands were along the coast and huge prehistoric animals populated the land. Drill cores extracted so far have shown oscillations in the climate from warm periods to frozen tundra. The climate in Antarctica has been going from glacial to interglacial for millions of years. The Cenozoic Era best mimics our climate and its current state.
PB: Core drilling has taken place all over the globe for many years and scientists have gathered plenty of rocks, sediment and soils to explore the climatic changes of the past. Why was it important to drill in Antarctica and study the same historical records buried underneath hundreds of meters of ice?
DH: There has been a lot of drilling around other parts of the world to give us Cenozoic climate history and to tell about warming and cooling. The environmental history is well known but often records far away from Antarctica have been pointing back to the isolated continent and saying: Antarctica must be the cause. Antarctica is driving the oceans. Antarctica is the engine for a lot of climate change. It is easy to make these assumptions and hypothesis when standing far away because anything is possible. As we get closer to the continent we find the ice sheets are more dynamic and they are coming and going faster than expected. We are here drilling because we need factual records of the ice sheets now. We are, for the first time, getting a complete record and can fit all the pieces of earth’s past climate history together. From roughly 10 million years ago until now we have uncovered 60 of these glacial to interglacial oscillations.
PB: How does the knowledge of the duration and extreme maximum and minimum temperature of these cyclic glacial/interglacial periods help us determine our future in a world of unknowns?
DH: The geological and climatic data we have grazed from the core is put into models. The climate ice sheet model is trying to predict what is going on today and it is pretty good at doing so. Everything is evolving and everything is improving. The more tests you run the more you tweak it to make it better. So using those modern conditions and tests we try to apply those back to the past. You have to have a working knowledge of the temperatures of the sea. You have to know the oceans weren’t frozen as they are now. You have to input the temperature on land and acknowledge higher sea levels long ago. With all the dating and extraction of historical parameters we then recreate the geological data and test whether the model can generate an accurate picture of Antarctica as it was millions of years ago during the natural oscillations in climate. Seeing the models have been able to predict the past we are hoping to use them to predict the future.
 Dr. Harwood with core samples |
PB: You have mentioned other advances in viewing technologies that have enabled better examination of drilling cores. Could you elaborate?
DH: This is something we developed called the “core wall.” As the core is extracted it is examined meter by meter. It is then split in half and through advancements in imagery analysis the core wall viewer can aid in finding climatic anomalies. We are on the forefront of data visualization technologies and its applications are being used with other projects. Namely, the Ocean Drilling Program, Intercontinental Drilling Program and deep sea drilling projects.
PB: The focus of the press has been the recent decline in sea ice in the Arctic and the possibility of an open Northwest Passage. Have you seen evidence of this same type of rapid melting of ice in Antarctica?
DH: Climatic changes are not so evident in Antarctica but in the Arctic it is tremendous. Over 20% of the sea ice has disappeared within the last year. So we are expecting to see in our lifetime an open Arctic Ocean.
PB: So Antarctica isn’t really a focal point of rapid climate change but have there been any occurrences of unexplained changes in Antarctica’s landscape?
DH: March 2002 the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet had a large piece of the shelf collapse from warm waters that percolated through it. The Larsen B ice shelf broke away dramatically and nobody predicted a piece the size of New Jersey could be broken off by surface melts and surface warming. This could be a normal pattern for Antarctica seeing we have been in colder conditions for the past 3 million years but now we are going back to warmer conditions. So the question is: What big changes are possible? Are the past historical records written in the rocks and can we use these records to tell us how big, how fast and how often those changes occur?
PB: There is a concern with natural versus man-made climate change. Is there evidence of man-made factors playing a role down here?
DH: Not yet but if carbon dioxide is playing a key role then how far off are we from what is the normal climate range? We haven’t seen where this is going. Here’s what we do know. From ice cores we get a record of temperature change from the oxygen and hydrogen isotopes and it is called the test temperature. Basically it tells when the ice formed and the natural cycle seems to be every 1000 years we have oscillations in climate. Some of this change is based on the earth’s orbit becoming more or less elliptical. The climatic heartbeat is pretty well known. It is about a 40,000 year cycle but by looking at the trapped gas within the ice cores you can also see that carbon dioxide also has a pattern. Overlay the carbon cycle over the climatic cycle and they are closely related in peaks and valleys. A question arises. Is the increase of carbon dioxide on a natural scale a result of climate change not the cause or vise versus? Carbon dioxide levels in the past might not be the driver but the response to a warmer planet. What is interesting is in all the cycles there is a temperature threshold or optimum temperature before going into the next glaciation. Some of the warm periods last a bit longer and the variance in the charts is evident but there still is a maximum temperature. The same is true for carbon dioxide levels. You could take a ruler and draw almost a straight line across the temperature maximums and the carbon dioxide maximums and it shows they peak at about the same temperature and carbon dioxide level every time and indicate precise periods of glacial and interglacial occurrences. Currently our levels of carbon dioxide are off the charts and we have surpassed previous natural maximums for normal climate cycles. The projections show a continuation of elevated carbon dioxide levels with higher maximums than ever before. So all the oil, gas and coal that has accumulated on the earth, organic in nature, we have put into the atmosphere in a mere 200 years. So what has taken 500 million years to accumulate in the form of fossil fuels has been put into our atmosphere in very short amount of time.
PB: What is the normal rate for putting this vast amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere?
DH: It never happened before. Never before has any natural process caused a carbon drain out of the earth’s rocks. You figure as a species we’ve changed the planet in no other way a species has ever done before which is not a good thing I would say. All the major geological periods in earth’s history are marked by extinctions. We are at the end of the Cenozoic Era and have humans actually caused what is going to be one of the largest mass extinctions in the earth’s history? Every year more is lost. We are in unprecedented times. We don’t know where this is going.
PB: What would you say to those who are pointing at the past and assuming we have been through these climatic cycles before and are under the impression this is all normal?
DH: I get that question often. There have been changes before. There have been glaciers coming and going. It’s a natural process and that is true. If we did not interfere with the natural cycle in 10,000 years we would be starting to go into a glacial period, but at the moment we are in unknown territory. In each of the glacial/interglacial periods there has beem about 300 parts per million of carbon dioxide. We have already exceeded this amount and the projections are for 600 parts per million. When that happens what does that do to climate? Hopefully we can model that forecast with our research of past cycles.
PB: Would you say that you are assessing a possible acceleration in climate change?
DH: By using past examples of what has happened we can say this is a normal change we are going through if we look at it without the extremes. We have been going through glacial and interglacial and as recently as 12,000 years ago most of North America was covered in ice and we were starting an extremely warm period. What we are studying is as many of these transition periods as possible. As of last year, we had over 60 cycles and with more of these discovered as we drill deeper we can understand how nature works under natural conditions in the recent past. By going back 4.5 to 5 million years during a warm period and then going back 14 million years ago to a super warm period we ask how did the ice sheets behave? The further you go back in time the better representation of what our future might look like so we have an expression: “Drilling back to the future.”
PB: Why are nations willing to invest in this research now?
DH: It is time to take a big step forward. We are in a position to take on a major world issue once again. In the 90s we had the ozone issues with aerosols and CFCs found to be the cause. Now most people don’t even know what Freon is. It is time to think about the human species and how we can improve our environment. We are in an International Polar Year (IPY). It is the 50th anniversary and is a celebration of science. It is a celebration of international science and the major research taking place in Antarctica and the Arctic. The International Geophysical Year (IGY) is when all the bases in Antarctica were established and the Antarctic Treaty was signed. ANDRILL is the big project within IPY and it has all the right elements seeing it is an international collaboration. Germany, Italy, Great Britain, New Zealand and the US are all pulling resources and scientists to address the global issue of climate change. That is huge. One country could not do what ANDRILL is doing. We could not support this effort without partnerships. It is great to be a scientist within this international mix because we are learning about each other culturally through science and that is what this continent should be about.
