A team of researchers led by a University of Manitoba professor is celebrating a significant milestone in a seven-year scientific quest in Greenland.
Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, who is also a prof at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, leads the team that successfully drilled through 2,670 metres of ice on the North Greenland Ice Stream, hitting bedrock. It’s a first for ice core researchers, and could be crucial to helping predict sea level rise in future.
Dahl-Jensen told Global Winnipeg the project, which involves researchers from 12 countries, has been long in the works — especially due to two years off during the COVID-19 pandemic — but is worth it for the knowledge scientists will be able to glean from the site.
“The findings are fabulous,” she said.
“It’s the first ice core that’s been drilled through an ice stream — and an ice stream is something very special, it’s kind of a stream of ice that flows like a river from the centre out toward the margins, where its discharge ice is calving icebergs into the ocean.
“This ice is moving much faster than the surrounding ice, and in this way, it’s contributing a lot to the mass loss of the Greenland Ice Sheet and thereby the sea level rise by discharging all of this ice into the ocean.”
Dahl-Jensen said it was known that the surface of the ice was moving at 58 metres per year, but it wasn’t previously known how fast the bedrock was moving.
“What we learned is that the whole ice stream is moving simply like a block, so it’s floating on mud and water under the ice and just zooming out toward the coast.
“We thought there would be some friction that was holding it back, but we see it’s moving fastly out toward the coast.
“This means a lot for our predictions of sea level rise in the future, because the ice streams are a very important component of this and by learning how they flow, we are capable of putting it into models and also modelling what happens into the future.”
Although spending summers in Greenland year after year to drill through ice may not seem ideal to many, Dahl-Jensen said it’s been rewarding working with a team of scientists from around the globe.
“I find it’s really giving to be together with such an international flock of students, and especially many of the young researchers,” she said.
“It’s also fun because there’s so much technology we’re developing that’s unique to this place. It’s all very unique and very special for these kinds of operations.”
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