IU research team to travel to Antarctica

Two Bloomington residents are preparing for negative temperatures and harsh winds for the weekend.\nThis Friday, an IU adjunct faculty member and two IU grad students will leave for a two-month research trip to Antarctica after they make a stop in New Zealand.\nResearch scientist and IU adjunct faculty member Michael Prentice has been to Antarctica 12 other times and said he is still in awe of the terrain.\n“(I’m impressed by) ... the immensity of the place and also its pristine nature,” Prentice said. “As you’re flying and you cross the southern ocean, it’s white. And it’s white as far as the eye can see.”\nBut for venture No. 13, he is looking beyond the white for dirt.\nPrentice said he hopes that by studying samples of sediment in different altitudes of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, he will be able to reconstruct its history and determine how quickly the ice sheet has been melting and why.\nThe ice sheet has lost more than 60 percent of its mass in the past 5,000 to 15,000 years, Prentice said.\nIU geology grad student Ross Dybvig said the research will show on “what terms” ice sheets respond to warming.\nPrentice said the research team, which also includes University of Washington students and faculty, a technical worker from the U.S. Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory and several New Zealand drilling experts, will be using diamond-bit drilling from helicopters to collect a large part of their data, which is a new technique for the U.S. \n“The research is about understanding the susceptibility or sensitivity of one of the big ice sheets in Antarctica to warming,” Prentice said. “We think that has significance for the current behavior of the ice sheet and its current sensitivity to global warming.”\nPrentice said this “global warming” takes place over thousands of years. The research will hopefully conclude whether the warming occurred about 15,000 years ago or 7,000 years ago.\n“It’s a global concern as to why the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is showing significant signs of \nmelting right now,” Prentice said. “People are concerned that it might collapse in some significant ways as global warming continues.”\nPrentice hypothesizes the data will probably show that the ice sheet has been gradually melting over 15,000 years, or since the last warming period. \nBut if the results show that it’s been melting only within the last 7,000 years, the conclusions could be momentous. He said that kind of data would indicate the ice sheet is capable of changing faster and is more sensitive to the modern warming period than people have thought.\nHowever, unlike Prentice and technical personnel, not everyone on this expedition is a seasoned veteran. \nAfter taking survival crash courses in New Zealand, Dybvig will be journeying to Antarctica for his first time.\nHe said he wants to apply the technical skills that he will gain, like using ground-penetrating radar, to asteroids and other planets, specifically Mars.\nA trip to Antarctica played a big factor in persuading him to attend IU as a grad student, so Dybvig said there is only one thing that makes him anxious about this research project.\n“I guess I’m not really too nervous about (the trip or research),” Dybvig said. “But I am worried about how cold it could get.”