Nancy Bertler

Victoria University of Wellington and GNS Science

International polar ice coring programmes (eg, 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.

Metadata and website links

NZ ITASE metadata

Evans Piedmont Glacier clean snow pit sampling for recent decade trace element record and AWS (2004-2008) data collection

Surface snow samples containing aeolian dust recovered from 40 sites on first and multi-year McMurdo sea ice using ultra clean methodology in November 2009

ITASE website

Nancy's website

Roosevelt Island Climate Evolution (RICE) Project website