\t\t\t\tby Seth Shulman <\/p>\n
It takes a certain kind of person to gather ice cores from remote glaciers, cart them back to a
\nlab, and unlock the clues they contain about the climate record. Such a person needs to be
\nhardy and skilled enough in the field to lead expeditions loaded with equipment
\ninto some of the world’s most rugged-and frigid-mountain terrain. Back at the lab,
\nthis person needs technical acumen and a meticulous attention to detail in order to measure the cores’ trace chemicals down to the parts-per-trillion level. To be a glacial
\ndetective, in other words, a person needs to be a little Stephen Hawking and a little
\nIndiana Jones, which pretty much describes Cameron Wake, a daring climate geek
\nfrom the University of New Hampshire.\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Wake fell in love
\nwith mountains at age 14, while he was in a rigorous climbing program in the Canadian
\nRockies. Straight out of college with a degree in geology, he got a job monitoring
\na glacier’s movement. “Once I was paid to work on a glacier, it was all over,”
\nhe says with a chuckle. “My career path was set.”\n<\/p>\n
At 23, Wake landed
\na job with a scientific expedition studying glacier hydrology in the Karakoram Mountains of northern Pakistan.
\nBecause of his mountaineering and skiing skills, the team trusted him to gather
\ndata in the most remote regions of the glacier. “I was hooked,” says Wake, who spent four consecutive summers in
\nPakistan’s mountains.\n<\/p>\n
After completing his master’s degree in geography, he went on to the
\nUniversity of New Hampshire for a PhD in earth sciences. His specialty? The climatic and
\nenvironmental evidence locked inside the icy interior of glaciers. Since earning
\nhis PhD, Wake has led or collaborated in expeditions that have collected and
\nanalyzed glacial ice cores from Antarctica to Kyrgyzstan. He has coauthored
\ndozens of peer-reviewed scientific papers analyzing the data from those cores.\n<\/p>\n
“Glaciers present
\na superb archive of how humans have dramatically changed the Earth’s atmosphere,”
\nWake says. “If you put out a call for engineers to design a system that stored
\npristine samples of the atmosphere for hundreds of thousands of years, I doubt
\nthey could design a better system than glaciers.” \n<\/p>\n
Before Wake can study glacial cores, he has to
\nget them, and that requires drilling them out. Even under the best circumstances the job is a logistical
\nnightmare; sometimes, it’s damn near impossible. In the Himalayas, says Wake,
\nthe terrain was so treacherous and the elevations so high that his team couldn’t
\nland a helicopter—even if the local authorities had allowed them to use one. Instead,
\nexpedition members had to carry virtually all the equipment and the frozen
\ncores.\n<\/p>\n
For the job, Wake’s team developed a whole range of
\nlightweight, flexible gear. The centerpiece of the effort, the so-called Eclipse
\ndrill, which can bore hundreds of meters into the ice, could be broken down
\ninto parts small and light enough to be carried. This ingenious workhorse, powered
\nby solar panels, removes ice cores one meter at a time. The Eclipse performs with
\nremarkable efficiency, but boring down hundreds of meters is long, painstaking
\nwork, and anything can happen. The core barrel, for example, can get stuck, and
\nthe drill might need to have its teeth sharpened. “Let’s put it this way,” Wake
\nquips: “you’re happy when the boring is boring.”\n<\/p>\n
Once the core samples arrive back at the University
\nof New Hampshire, they are temporarily housed in a freezer the size of a small
\nhouse. Wake thinly slices the cores in clean-room conditions, and using elaborate
\nprocedures melts out their centers while avoiding any possibility of
\ncontamination. Then the high-tech analysis begins.\n<\/p>\n
“Basically,” Wake says, “we’re looking at very
\nspecific kinds of impurities in the snowflakes that have fallen and in the atmospheric
\ndust that has settled to create the glacier’s historical record.”\n<\/p>\n
A large number of chemical compounds trapped in the
\nice can provide a chronicle of both local and global changes in the atmosphere at a given
\ntime. Wake and his colleagues can detect the unmistakable buildup of greenhouse
\ngases, such as carbon dioxide, that are causing the planet to warm. The seasonal fluctuations of sea salt and stable isotopes of carbon trapped in the ice are like tree rings. By reading them, Wake’s
\nteam dates the samples precisely. In an ice core from Antarctica,
\nfor instance, scientists counted back through 80,000 years of seasonal
\nfluctuations. Levels of an isotope of oxygen and hydrogen in the samples were good indicators of changes in temperature at different periods in the past.\n<\/p>\n
Wake and his colleagues read other chemical traces as though they were scouring a stack of old newspapers. The sudden appearance of radioactive cesium, for instance,
\nmarks the advent of aboveground nuclear tests by the United States and the Soviet Union prior to the 1963 test-ban treaty. And even
\nin the planet’s most remote glaciers, Wake detects the
\nsurge in lead that heralds the rise of the automobile. The changes are
\nunmistakable, “like a baseball bat hitting you on the head,” he says. The evidence of global warming that is buried in glacial ice, he says, has been clear for decades. But finding it is not enough. Glacier
\nscientists like Wake want to describe not just how the climate has changed but why.\n<\/p>\n
“It is a lot like cancer research,” Wake says. “There
\nis much more work to be done to understand exactly how cancers are triggered
\nand how they develop. But we still know more than enough to deal with and treat
\nindividuals with cancer, sometimes with remarkable success. The same is true with
\nclimate change research. The planet’s climate is an exceedingly complex system,
\nand there is still a lot to learn about exactly how it operates. Nonetheless, we
\nknow more than enough to act, and the treatment for the planet is clear: as
\nquickly as we possibly can, we need to reduce the levels of greenhouse gases we
\nare emitting and make the transition to a more sustainable future that includes
\ngreener energy technologies.”\n<\/p>\n
\n<\/p>\n
This Related Links:<\/strong><\/p>\n Biochar – probably not going to save the world after all<\/a><\/p>\n Underground Green Economy Employing Millions<\/a><\/p>\n
\nis the third installment of America’s
\nClimate Scientists: A series from the Union of
\nConcerned Scientists<\/a>. Click here<\/a> to read all the climate scientist profiles.<\/em>\n<\/p>\n
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