PolarTREC - Ice Core Drilling in West Antarctica

Heidi Roop will be blogging once again for PolarTREC during the 2010-11 field season. Heidi is a science technician at WAIS Divide logging and handling the ice core as it is drilled.

PolarTREC (Teachers and Researchers Exploring and Collaborating in the Arctic and Antarctic) is a program of the Arctic Research Consortium of the United States (ARCUS), funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in which K-12 teachers participate in polar research, working closely with scientists as a pathway to improving science education.

PolarTREC - Ice Core Drilling in West Antarctica

PolarTREC (Teachers and Researchers Exploring and Collaborating in the Arctic and Antarctic) is a program of the Arctic Research Consortium of the United States (ARCUS), funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in which K-12 teachers participate in polar research, working closely with scientists as a pathway to improving science education. PolarTREC builds on the outstanding scientific and cultural opportunities in the Arctic and Antarctic to link research and education through intriguing topics that will engage students and the wider public.

Heidi Roop will be blogging for PolarTREC from approximately November 12 - February 1, 2010. Heidi is a science technician at WAIS Divide logging and handling the ice core as it is drilled.

Ice Stories: Dispatches from Polar Scientists - WAIS Divide Ice Drilling

For the International Polar Year, the Exploratorium gave polar scientists cameras and blogging tools and asked them to document their field work. Heidi Roop will soon be blogging for Ice Stories -- check back soon for the link to Heidi's blog!! Heidi is a science technician at WAIS Divide logging and handling the ice core as it is drilled.

Transmissions from the Ice Sheet - An Oregon State student braves Antarctica

Geosciences Ph.D. student Thomas Bauska will spend the next three months at the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Divide research station, helping an international team collect a 3 kilometer ice core. This blog is not only a chronicle of his day-to-day life, but a means for young people interested in science to communicate with a researcher who is working actively on one of the most important issues we face - climate change.

Adventures in Climate Change: Drilling into the Past

Maria Banks is a core handler at WAIS Divide logging and handling the ice core as it is drilled. Maria received a Ph.D. in geology and planetary science from the University of Arizona in the spring of 2009. Her graduate studies primarily involved the study of glaciers and ice sheets, climate change, and ice-related processes and erosional/depositional landforms on Earth and Mars. She is currently a post-doctoral fellow with the Smithsonian Institution in the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

Anna McKee - Ice Cores, Transluscent Truths from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet

Anna McKee was selected for the National Science Foundation's Antarctic Artist and Writers Program to travel to West Antarctica to sketch, photograph, and observe the WAIS Divide Ice Core Project field camp and surrounding ice sheet plateau. The artist plans to create a suite of etchings and multimedia prints based on this source material. The artwork will be exhibited, published in a catalog, and shared with the public through a series of artist talks and school presentations.

WAIS Divide Ice Core Project Outreach
November 2008 - January 2009: Various people down in Antarctica will be contributing blogs this year. You can read them all here. Tufts University: Zach Smith, November 2007- January 2008

Transmissions from the Ice Sheet: An Oregon State University Student braves the Antarctic
Transmissions from the Ice Sheet is a chronicle of Logan Mitchell's trek to Antarctica as a member of a the WAIS Divide Ice Core field team. Mitchell, a Ph.D. student in geosciences at Oregon State University and part of Dr. Ed Brook's ice coring lab, will work at the WAIS Divide research station as a core handler during the 2008/2009 field season- ultimately part of the core will end up in Brook's lab, where he and his group will study it in order to reconstruct a record of Antarctic climate change over the last 100,000 years. Transmissions will give the world a window into the day-to-day life of a scientist working in a remote and inhospitable place.

Borehole Optical Stratigraphy
University of Washington: Ben Smith and Jessica Drees, December 2006

Evolution of the central West Antarctic Ice Sheet using ice-penetrating radar
University of Washington: Kenny Matsuoka, Ryann Eastman, Joe MacGregor, and Donovan Power, 2005