West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide (WAIS Divide) Ice Core
WAIS Divide is a United States deep ice coring project in West Antarctica
funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and is the second component to the larger WAISCORES initiative. The purpose of the WAIS Divide project is to collect a deep ice core from the flow divide in central West Antarctica in order to develop a unique series of interrelated climate, ice dynamics, and biologic records focused on understanding interactions among global earth systems.
The WAIS Divide ice core will provide Antarctic records of environmental change with the highest possible time resolution for the last ~100,000 years and will be the Southern Hemisphere equivalent of the Greenland GISP2, GRIP, and North GRIP ice cores.
The most significant and unique characteristic of the WAIS Divide
project will be the development of climate records with an absolute,
annual-layer-counted chronology for the most recent ~40,000 years.
In addition, due to the high snowfall rate, the WAIS Divide record will have only a small offset between the ages of the ice and the air trapped in the ice. The combination of high-time resolution and this small age offset will allow us to study interactions between climate variations and atmospheric composition with a level of detail previously not possible in deep long Antarctic ice core records.
As such, the WAIS Divide ice core will enable detailed
comparison of environmental conditions between the northern and southern
hemispheres, and the study of greenhouse gas concentrations in the
paleo-atmosphere, with a greater level of detail than previously possible.
The main science objectives of the WAIS Divide project are:
Develop the most detailed record of greenhouse gases possible for the last 100,000 years
Determine if the climate changes that occurred during the last 100,000 years were initiated by changes in the northern or southern hemisphere
Investigate the past and future stability of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet
This site is administered by the WAIS Divide Ice Core Project Science Coordination Office (Desert Research Institute and University of New Hampshire)
This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under award OPP-0440817 to the Desert Research Institute; University of Nevada-Reno.
Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
