Ice Coring Season Wrapping Up; Survey Flights Progressing at South Pole
Happy New Year! The COLDEX ice coring team at Allan Hills is wrapping up coring operations and preparing to head back to McMurdo Station. They were recently featured in a piece on CBS News: American scientists explore Antarctica for oldest-ever ice to help understand climate change. We’ll have more updates from them next week. In the meantime, here’s an update from our airborne team at the South Pole!
Update from the Airborne Team
We have made great progress in our work at South Pole, with six survey flights launched over the last eight days. We have a lot of work still to go, but major gaps in last years survey are now filled, have sent a scouting mission to connect to older surveys, and have started densifying coverage in areas that will be important for understanding processes that preserve old ice. We have held off on resurveying potions of last years grid until Kansas got the cargo with the computers to process their radar data. In the coming week, we will start prioritizing preflights for demonstrating the repeat pass interferometry technique that promises to track the interior motion of the ice sheet. With arrival of our cargo on December 27th, we now have the reassurance of equipment spares. Thanks again to the great KBA crew and the team at South Pole for an immensely productive start, despite the now resolved cargo challenges. - Update from Duncan Young, University of Texas faculty member and Science co-lead for base operations and flight planning for project I-185
Status of flights: Solid white lines are completed flights this season, green line is December 29th flight, black are flights options for the coming days. Dotted white segment is the Clean Air Sector. Background is bedrock topography obtained from last years survey with darker colors being deeper, with superposed ice surface elevation contours. We are now out on our sixth survey flight.
Megan Kerr takes a calibration gravity measurement in the ice tunnels under South Pole Station.
South Pole Station as imaged on the first survey flight on December 22, 2023.
