You may have heard about the recent research from the Allan Hills region of Antarctica, where a multi-institution research team from the National Science Foundation Center for Oldest Ice Exploration (NSF-COLDEX) discovered six-million-year-old ice — the oldest dated ice on the planet.
Peter Neff is a co-author on that paper, co-director of knowledge transfer at COLDEX, and an assistant professor in the University of Minnesota’s Department of Soil, Water, and Climate (in the College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences).
But the quest for the world’s oldest ice isn’t the only icy science Neff has been working on. At the Minnesota NICE (Neff Ice and Climate Exploration) Lab, Neff and his team also lead efforts looking to glaciers in West Antarctica and British Columbia to gain insights about Earth’s recent climate history captured in ice.
His team’s work on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) isn’t coring for the world’s oldest ice. Instead, the goal is to address gaps in climate data along the expansive WAIS coastline, which faces the Southern Pacific Ocean and where persistent glacier ice loss contributes to rising global sea levels. Thwaites Glacier, a key outlet glacier of the WAIS, is of particular concern.
Historical data from ice cores in this region could be key to contextualizing the glacier’s modern behavior and making predictions for the future, but Thwaites’s location on the continent’s wet and rugged West Antarctic coastline makes getting the necessary equipment and personnel in position to drill ice cores extremely difficult.
“We can study this region all we want in the present, but it’s very tricky to study the past behavior of Thwaites Glacier,” Neff explains. After spending a decade framing the value of work in this region, Neff and his collaborators managed to mount an expedition to a site near Thwaites, supported by the South Korean icebreaker RV ARAON and its helicopters. The 150 meter–deep ice cores collected on this January 2024 trip will likely allow for reconstruction of annual climate and environmental conditions going back to the year 1920.
In British Columbia, Neff says he and his team aren’t so much running full speed toward an urgent science question as they are digging deep into a unique location of preserved ice layers. This project is focused on the climatology of southwestern British Columbia at Mount Waddington, just 175 miles northwest of Vancouver. Due to its 10,000 ft elevation and high annual snowfall, the site is cold enough to preserve interpretable annual snow layers.
“This site is much farther south than you would usually be able to drill for ice cores in North America,” Neff says, making Mount Waddington an unusual source of paleoclimate data. The 219 meter–deep ice core recovered in summer 2023 at this location will likely establish a record of snow accumulation for the last 200-300 years, helping researchers understand how the Pacific Northwest hydroclimate has varied over that time period.
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