Oregon State University will lead a National Science Foundation-funded effort to discover Antarctica’s oldest ice and learn more about how Earth’s climate has changed over the past several million years.
The Center for Oldest Ice Exploration, or COLDEX, will be built under a five-year, $25 million science and technology center award announced Thursday.
The center will bring together experts from across the United States to generate knowledge about Earth’s climate system and share this knowledge to advance efforts to address climate change and its effects.
“This is fundamental exploration science,” said Ed Brooke, a paleontologist in the OSU College of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences and principal investigator of COLDEX.
“What we want is to see how Earth behaves when it has warmed over the past million years. To do that, we need to find and collect ice cores that go very far.”
The oldest continuous record of Antarctic ice, collected by drilling miles below the continent’s surface, is currently about 800,000 years old. Brooke said the researchers hope to find a continuous record that goes back 1.5 million years.
“The characteristics of the climate system were really different in the period between 800,000 years ago and 1.5 million years ago,” he said.
Brooke and the Coldex collaborators also hope to detect much older ice, perhaps three million years old and even older. Older ice is unlikely to be found in the continuous record, but preliminary research suggests that patches of old ice are trapped in the mountains around Antarctica.
“This ice and the pristine air trapped in it will offer an unprecedented record of how greenhouse gases and climates are linked to warmer climates and will help advance our understanding of what controls the long-term rhythms of Earth’s climate system, Brooke said.
COLDEX is one of six new science and technology centers announced by the National Science Foundation, which currently supports 12 centers, with the last group being funded in 2016.
The objective of the program, established in 1987, is to support transformational, complex research programs in fundamental areas of science that require large-scale, long-term funding.
Brooke said Oregon State is well qualified to lead COLDEX because the university has a growing polar science program.
The university is also home to the Marine and Geology Repository, one of the largest reserves in the country for marine sediment cores, which also has Antarctic ice core samples stored in freezers kept 20 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.
But the quest to find Antarctica’s oldest ice is a collaborative affair.
University partners on the project include Amherst College; Brown University; Dartmouth College; Princeton University; University of California, Berkeley; UC Irvine; UC San Diego; University of Kansas; University of Maine; University of Minnesota, Duluth; University of Minnesota, Twin Cities; University of Texas; and the University of Washington.
“Drilling ice cores is very difficult, very expensive and can take years,” Brooke said.
“We will do a lot of modeling and also develop new tools to help us pinpoint the best places to search.”
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