Team led by UMass Amherst Scientists Drills Deep into the Arctic for Climate Change Insights

March 16, 2009

Contact:

Janet Lathrop 413/545-0444

AMHERST, Mass. – Today, as reported in a feature story in the Boston Globe’s Science & Innovation section, an international research team led by Julie Brigham-Grette, geosciences, with UMass Amherst doctoral student Kenna Wilkie, began drilling a sediment core under frozen Lake El’gygytgyn in Siberia. The researchers, with colleagues in Russia and Germany, hope to extract an 1,800-foot core, 1.5 times longer than the Empire State Building is tall, that represents about 3.6 million years of sediment history under the lake. They’ll use this unique core to build the longest time-continuous climate record ever collected in the Arctic.

The start of drilling caps almost ten years of planning and many months of preparation under frigid conditions in the Siberian winter. A convoy of five huge equipment containers—including modular housing to protect the scientists and the recovered cores—plus the drill rig set out around Jan. 1 to build a 250-mile ice road from an airstrip to the lake, 62 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Almost impossibly remote, “Lake E,” was formed when a monster meteor more than a half-mile across slammed into the Earth. Because this area between the Arctic Ocean and Bering Sea was never covered by ice sheets or glaciers, it has received a steady drift of sediment—as much as a quarter mile (1,312 feet) deep – since impact. It therefore offers a continuous depositional record unlike any other in the world, say Brigham-Grette and colleagues, under the crater lake that’s just over 560 feet deep.

Brigham-Grette says analyzing the core will be a detective story involving painstaking comparison of climate change evidence in the Arctic to similar records from the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and Antarctica. Overall, the scientists hope to “get a much better idea how the Earth has worked as a system” in the past, and to make some predictions about what climate change might mean in our future, she says.

E-mail story to a friend Printer-friendly version