Climate Change

NZ ITASE – Climate variability along the Victoria Land coast

Principal Investigator: Nancy Bertler
Organisation: Victoria University of Wellington

International polar ice coring programmes (e.g. GISP and Vostok) have provided powerful new insights into Earth’s climate back 400,000 years from the diverse inventory of atmospheric information stored both within the ice and trapped air bubbles.  To understand and predict the local response to anthropogenically induced global warming seen in these “global” ice cores, the focus of ice core research in Antarctica is moving to the acquisition of “local” ice cores that overlap with and extend the instrumental records of the last 40 years back several thousand years.  This has been a key motivation behind the US-led International Transantarctic Scientific Expedition (ITASE) of which New Zealand is now a member. 

The project’s objective is to recover a series of ice cores from glaciers along a 14-degree latitudinal transect of the climatically sensitive Victoria Land coastline and thereby directly contribute a critical dataset to ITASE.

Recent Publications:
Bertler, N. A. N. et al. El Nino suppresses Antarctic warming. Geophysical research letters 31: L15207, doi:10.1029/2004GL020749, 2004. View Abstract.

Bertler, N. A. N. et al. Monsoonal circulation of the McMurdo Dry Valleys -Signal from the snow chemistry. Annals of Glaciology 39: 139-145. 2004.

Bertler, N. A. N. 2003. Understanding the climate behaviour of the McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica, from coastal ice cores. Ph.D., Victoria University of Wellington.