An Arctic ice-coring expedition to Tunu, Greenland (2022): Objectives, field experiences, and research prospects

Vortrag von Brandon McDonald (Basel) im Rahmen des Kolloquiums «Zur neueren Forschung in der Alten Geschichte» im HS 2022.

Glaciers and ice sheets form season by season, year by year, as layers of snow accumulate and compress into ice. Particles including desert dust, ash from explosive volcanic eruptions, soot from wildfires, and, during recent centuries and millennia, elements from industrial pollution become trapped in the ice, capturing detailed records of past climate and environmental history. By drilling into polar ice and removing long cylinders of ice called ice cores, scientists can access these ancient records. The ice core samples are then analyzed and used to answer questions about Earth and its past, including human history. The journey to collect an ice core is a story in itself. This lecture will discuss such a journey, led by scientists from DRI in Reno, Nevada (which included this archaeologist from the University of Basel) who embarked for northern Greenland in May 2022. They were joined by ice drilling, Arctic logistics, and mountaineering experts. Together, the team set out to collect a 440 meter-long ice core representing 4,000 years of Earth and human history. The talk will detail project goals, experiences in the Arctic field, our next steps in the lab, and research prospects with the data we collected.

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